The inalienable right to be annoying

The law has recently come down on the side of the angels in holding that a NSW law enacted for the purposes of the recent World Youth Day event (more correctly, it should have been renamed as ‘Catholic Youth-And-Creepy-Old-Men Week’) in Sydney was invalid. By angels, I’m obviously referring to the people on the side of justice and liberty, not magic fairies with wings (or even the literal, biblical, men-shaped ‘messengers’ – yes, I know my biblical interpretation).

This abhorrent law prohibited anyone from causing ‘annoyance’ to World Yoof Day participants (with fines of up to $5,500).

Apart from the fact that we don’t live in a theocracy (yet), what does that even mean?

And the court agreed with my rhetorical question, saying that there was "no intelligible boundary" on what "causes annoyance", and that, in relation to the defendants (two women who wanted to hand out condoms) the regulation "could be expected to have a chilling effect upon the exercise of their freedom of speech because of the very uncertainty about the degree of its infringement upon that freedom": Court Dumps 'Annoy' Law (it was even reported on the other side of the world: Sydney Overturns Pope Protest Law).

One of the the judges was also reported to have said: “Yippee!! Free condoms!!”

There was so much wrong with that law, and Day/Week, that I might just focus on one of the specific problems with the law, being that people weren’t sure if they could wear T-shirts with anti-Pope slogans (pretty harmless stuff like "Pope Go Homo" and "The Pope Is Wrong - Put a Condom On" – sweet pick-up lines, too, if you want them).

And then I will use that focus to segue into another Religion vs. T-shirt drama that broke just before the Pope arrived. Seems some kid was wearing a T-shirt on the Gold Coast that said ‘Jesus is a Cunt’. Charming, I know, and I hope my daughter brings a boy like that home one day (wearing the T-shirt, of course), but apparently the kid was then arrested and charged with causing offence. Lawrence Money from The Age then took up the case for the prosecution on his blog, no doubt expecting much support for his views.

Support was mixed, I must say.

Someone called the rilestar posted the following comment – it’s pretty switched on:

I agree that it's offensive, because it's clearly grammatically incorrect - this kid's got his tenses all wrong*!! It should be Jesus WAS a C-nt!!

As we all know, Jesus was a Jewish rabble-rouser who was executed for seditious activities by the Romans 2000 years ago. 2000 years ago!! He's an ex-rabble-rouser. In fact, the T-shirt sounds like something the Roman authorities would have authorised, because the said rabble-rouser vexed them so.

Conclusion: Button A for offences against grammar. The T-shirt should obviously be in past tense.

And possibly Latin.

* Obviously, a lot of the posts on this blog are offensive for the same reason. Next discussion: Why are atheists so much better at spelling?

The various posts make a good read – I can recommend wasting some time on them.

Finally, just to get this all back to what it’s really all about, apparently this photo was taken during the ‘celebrations’ (although the parking sign in the background doesn’t appear to be in English…)

Nonetheless, wherever it was taken, it’s Gold: