bob tarantino

"cast of lowlifes"

And here I thought the book would have no relevance to anyone.  As I explain in Chapter Five of Under Arrest - Canadian Laws You Won't Believe, it remains a crime in Canada to publish blasphemous material.  That provision of our Criminal Code, as with so many, is derived from English law - where it appears that free speech is due to get a bit of a workout:

The leader of a small evangelical group went to Britain's High Court on Tuesday in a bid to sue the producers of ``Jerry Springer: The Opera" for blasphemy.

... Earlier this year, a lower court rejected a request to issue summonses against "Springer" producer John Thoday and Mark Thompson, director-general of the British Broadcasting Corp., which televised the show in 2005.  Green's lawyers are asking three High Court judges to allow private prosecution for blasphemous libel.

Evidently the English anti-blasphemy law has been successfully used as recently as 1977.

"trying for years to get the religion recognized"

You want fascinating?  I'll give you fascinating.  It seems that some Wiccans in the US are aggrieved (rightfully, frankly), that a Wiccan pentacle is not an approved symbol for military headstones:

The widows of two combat veterans sued the government Monday for not allowing Wiccan symbols on their husbands' military headstones.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs allows military families to choose any of 38 authorized headstone images. The list includes commonly recognized symbols for Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism, as well as those for smaller religions such as Sufism Reoriented, Eckiankar and the Japanese faith Seicho-No-Ie.

The Wiccan pentacle, a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, is not on the list, an omission that the widows say is unconstitutional.

The CNN story is a little bit off: you can apparently put whatever you want on a military headstone, but they will only pay for headstones carrying certain pre-approved images - so if the widows in question want to have the Wiccan pentacle on there, they have to shell out for it themselves.

Here is the list of approved symbols, comprised of 38 designs, some of which are, as the article noted, decidedly obscure: they include Eckankar (a religion evidently led by Harold Klemp ("the Mahanta, the Living ECK Master"), the United Moravian Church and the "Humanist Emblem of Spirit".  Best-design-from-a-1940s-pulp-sci-fi-magazine award goes to number 16: "Atheist", with its forlorn "A" trapped in what appears to be a doodle from a high school student's science lab notebook.

IP gurus out there will especially appreciate discontinuous items 97 and 98, the "Christian Scientist (Cross & Crown)" and "Muslim (Islamic 5 Pointed Star)" designs, since the designs are apparently super-secret: only the rather dismal notation "Not shown because of copyrights" marks their place.

All of this is a relatively recent phenomenon: according to this history from the Department of Veterans Affairs, it wasn't until some time between 1930 and 1941 that even a Christian cross was allowed on headstones.  The next addition to the approved list appears to have been the "Buddhist emblem" added in 1951.  It was all, as they say, downhill from there.