Constitutional Law: Damning Blasphemy

At a high school carnival in Westminster, Md., one evening last year, Irving West, a truck driver just out of the Army, got into a fight. When a local policeman seized him, West snapped: “Get your goddam hands off me.” Next day Magistrate Charles J. Simpson sentenced West to 30 days in jail and a $25 fine for disorderly conduct. That came as no surprise, but the 20-year-old veteran was totally unprepared for what followed. He was hit with an additional 30-day sentence and another $25 fine for violation of Maryland’s 320-year-old blasphemy law. West, the magistrate ruled, “did unlawfully use profanity by taking the Lord’s name in vain in a public place.”

Unusual as it was, the case was by no means unprecedented. The same magistrate, who had become aware of the blasphemy statute only a few months earlier, had’ already fined at least three other men on similar charges. Supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, West decided to appeal. On the basis of his arguments, Circuit Court Judge Edward Weant Jr. has now ruled that Maryland’s law is unconstitutional because it violates the free-speech and establishment-of-religion clauses of the First Amendment.

The Maryland statute provides for a maximum of six months and $100 “if any person, by writing or speaking, shall blaspheme or curse God, or shall write or utter any profane words of and concerning our Saviour Jesus Christ, or of and concerning the Trinity, or any of the persons thereof.” Similar statutes exist in half the states in the U.S. Most of them can be traced back to England and the 17th century, when penalties were harsh. In an early Maryland version of the law, first offenders had a hole bored through their tongues with a hot iron, second-timers had a “B” branded into their foreheads and anyone foolhardy enough to be caught the third time suffered death without benefit of clergy. The Maryland legislature had an opportunity to do away with the current, milder version as recently as 1953, when it repealed a companion section on cursing (penalty: 25¢ for the first word, 50¢ for every word thereafter). But the lawmakers left the blasphemy portion intact.

Arguing in favor of the statute, the state contended that blasphemy is no longer religious in nature but is a violation of decency in a secular sense. Judge Weant was not swayed. Secular or not, Weant said, the law violated the right to free speech. Nor did blasphemy seem to him to be merely secular when most authorities “tacitly admit that it is a crime only because it occurs in a land where the Christian religion is prevalent.” In light of recent Supreme Court decisions, Weant concluded that “any law, including blasphemy, which seeks to protect any form of religion, much less Christianity,” is now impossible to uphold.