Australia:Pastors’ conviction for quoting Quran overturned
Good news from Australia about a sad and wrong attempt to stifle free speech by a misguided judge. Remember, one of the things they were censured for was…reading from the Qur’an. From WorldNetDaily.com
Two Australian pastors who were convicted of “vilifying” Muslims when they quoted from the Quran during a seminar on jihad have had their appeals upheld by the Victorian Supreme Court.
And while that means they will return to a lower court for another trial, that actually is a good result, according to a new report from Voice of the Martyrs.
“In a sense we are happy with this decision… It means this case will be kept alive in the public consciousness,” Pastor Danny Nalliah said in a VOM report. “There’s a need to keep these vilification laws in sharp focus to reveal the problems this law is creating.”
The Australian law was imposed in order to prevent the denigration of people based on their race or religion, and similar laws also have been approved in Canada, where critics of the law say they include sexual orientation and forbid pastors from condemning homosexuality as a sin.
Many of the “hate crimes” proposals in the United States are based on a similar concept: designating as “crimes” the statements people make about their own beliefs or convictions.
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December 29th, 2006 at 11:54 am
The pastors are now heavily in debt over this. If anyone else wants to help here is a link:
http://catchthefire.com.au/articles/general/Fighting
December 29th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
These pastors villified Islam by quoting from the Koran? Now that’s a scream! Everyone with half a brain knows that the Koran is simply a vile book-any quote from it will be vile no matter who it’s applied to-it’s automatic, like smelling bad when coming out of a sewer.
Hate crime=thought control.