FFRF Regional Government Affairs Manager Mickey Dollens has been given space in the Massachusetts newspaper Telegram & Gazette to urge the repeal of an archaic anti-blasphemy law.

“Until 1697, [blasphemy] was punishable by death, and later by branding the blasphemer’s tongue with a hot iron,” Dollens writes. “To this day, you can still be fined $300 or jailed for up to a year for ‘willfully blaspheming the holy name of God.’”

Dollens details the problems that have resulted from anti-blasphemy laws — and how Massachusetts has a chance to fix it:

Massachusetts is one of just six states that still have archaic anti-blasphemy laws on the books, alongside Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wyoming. This antediluvian statute dates back to America’s Colonial era, before the U.S. Constitution, when church and state were entangled and Puritan orthodoxy was enforced by law.

You might assume statutes like this are forgotten “blue laws” never enforced in modern times. But in Pennsylvania, enforcement happened as recently as 2010. George Kalman attempted to register a film production company named I Choose Hell Productions. State officials rejected his application because Pennsylvania statute says corporation names are not allowed to be “blasphemous.” A federal district court ruled that the enforcement of the state’s blasphemy statute violated the First Amendment. And yet, the unconstitutional law remains on the books, just like Massachusetts’ law remains today.

Letting laws like this stay in place sends the wrong message. It tells citizens that their rights are conditional, that religious speech is protected, but religious dissent can still be punished. And it leaves open the possibility that someone could misuse the law again, especially since the U.S. Supreme Court has shown a willingness to rewrite constitutional law in favor of religious litigants.

Thankfully, a Massachusetts lawmaker is working to fix this issue. State Sen. Rebecca Rausch has introduced SB 1251, a bill to repeal the state’s anti-blasphemy statute. The bill has successfully advanced out of its first committee and is now awaiting a vote in the Senate Rules Committee, just one step away from a full Senate vote. Massachusetts lawmakers should support and pass SB 1251 to finally bring state law in line with constitutional protections.

Dollens concludes by showing that religious liberty doesn’t need to be a partisan issue: “Faith-based religious liberty advocates agree. Groups such as the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty support repealing blasphemy laws. They understand what the Founders believed: True religious freedom requires the freedom to criticize, question, reject religion, and speak freely without fear of censorship or punishment.”

You can read the full op-ed here.

This column is part of FFRF’s initiative to engage with pertinent national and state issues and spread the messages of freethought and nontheism to a broader audience.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with over 42,000 members nationwide, including more than 800 members in Massachusetts. FFRF’s purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between church and state, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.

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