Blasphemy Forever

Almost half a century ago, an English busybody named Mary Whitehouse took a gay publisher to court in London for blasphemy. The publisher had printed a poem depicting a Roman centurion as a necrophile having his way with the corpse of Jesus Christ. She won the case but lost the culture war: Hers was the last successful prosecution for blasphemy in the United Kingdom, and in 2008, after decades as a dead letter, England’s blasphemy law officially ceased to exist.

But the moralists never left, and English authorities have stumbled when trying to figure out how to mediate between them and those they accuse. Last month, in the West Yorkshire town of Wakefield, a 14-year-old bought a bargain-basement English translation of the Quran on Amazon. (Known as the “,” it costs about $13.), and that police don’t generally conduct investigations of creased covers and smudged pages, would be hard to distinguish from a charge of blasphemy.