I don't care at all if anyone shares beliefs or not, but I don't think I have to put up with mockery or have performances such as Pussy riot's forced on me or any other believer.

What, precisely, about their performance in the church do you object to? It can't be the "screeching," because the sound was added in post.

Apparently, nobody found their dress or miming sufficiently offensive at the time to warrant any action beyond telling them to fuck off. Which they did, without further ado.

To get back to the point that started the whole debate: I want PR's behaviour criminalised for these reasons.

For what reason? Dressing provocatively in church? Filming a video in church? Staging a miming act in church?

Or posting a song you don't like on YouTube?

If an action is directed against political statements of clerics or hierarchies I have no issue with them. It's the activists responsibility not to take the church members hostage.

It is the laity's responsibility to not associate itself with reactionary clergy. To not give their time to reactionary clergy. To not go to the sermons of reactionary clergy. And to not give money to reactionary clergy.

If they won't do that, they own the policies, and they get to live with the criticism.

I have no sympathy at all for someone who claims to be offended by Pussy Riot and then meekly shuffles along to hear the Patriarch incite hate crimes against homosexuals, and peddle partisan political propaganda. No sympathy at all.

Just like I have no sympathy at all for people who are members of the British National Party "just for the rock concerts."

PR did that and that's what I want punished.

How did they take worshipers hostage? There were mostly tourists in the church at the time, and what they actually did while they were in the church didn't even merit a disorderly conduct charge.

Can you take people hostage retroactively, by publishing a video on YouTube?

I notice all right that you are forever telling me about US American TV preachers and other reactionaries. If that is not meant to insinuate that you find political influence of religious is necessarily right-wing, what else do you want to tell us then?

That if you argue for the right of religious people to not be insulted, you are arguing for the prosecution of people who say that gays are people too. Because there are religious people who find that sentiment to be a mortal insult.

And they are many. And they vote. So that is really not a precedent that any progressive with two neurons to rub together wants to set.

Add to this the fact is that the political influence of religion is predominantly right-wing, and it becomes really glaringly obvious why it is stupid and short-sighted to demand the right for religious groups to censor people they don't like on no other basis than that they don't like them.

Censorship is also morally wrong, but that argument doesn't seem to carry much weight with people whose religious knickers have gotten into a twist.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.