Christ libeled

Jury in Britain finds poem about Saviour blasphemy

LONDON (P)

A jury convicted

the British newspaper Gay News and its editor, Denis Lemon, of blasphemous libel yesterday for publishing a poem that depicted Christ as a homosexual.

The jury of seven men and five women voted 10 to 2 to convict Lemon and the newspaper in Britain's first blasphemy trial in 55 years. The verdict drew immediate protests from free-speech advocates.

Sentencing was set for today. Britain's anti-blasphemy laws, which trace back to the Middle Ages, carry no maximum penalty. The last man convicted got nine months at hard labor.

The poem, in which a homosexual Roman centurion describes his feelings toward Christ at the Crucifixion, was described by prosecutor John Smyth as "so vile that it would be hard for even the most perverted imagination to conjure up anything worse."

"We have free speech," Smyth told the court when the trial began last

Monday. "You can say Christ was a fraud or a deceiver or Christ may have been a homosexual, provided you say it in a reasonable, measured, reflective, decent way."

The defense, led by playwrightbarrister John C. Mortimer, said the poem by Oxford professor James Kirkup did not attack Christ but glorified him by asserting Christian beliefs and speaking of love for him.

Mrs. Mary Whitehouse, a wellknown antipornography campaigner who made the complaint that started the prosecution, said after the verdict: "I simply thank God... a line has at last been drawn and a limit set."

Lemon, 32, told reporters he was "shocked and disappointed," and the National Council for Civil Liberties condemned the verdict as "a dangerous new form of censorship."

The last man found guilty of blasphemy in Britain, John William Gott, was a secularist pamphleteer sentenced in 1922 for selling two of his works, "Rib Ticklers" and "God and Gott" in a London street.