This tale about a pastor, a priest and an imam gives me hope

Pastor James McConnell is back in business as an Evangelical preacher having been found not guilty on a couple of slightly obscure charges (improper use of a public electronic communications network and causing a grossly offensive message to be sent by means of a public electronic communications network). But the gist of the thing was that in the course of a sermon at the Whitewell Metropolitan Tabernacle in Belfast, he described Islam as ‘Satanic’, and was duly hauled up before a magistrates’ court. Unusually for Northern Ireland these days, the judge Liam McNally simply observed that the heat of his rhetoric had caused him to ‘lose the run of himself’ but that ‘It is not the task of the criminal law to censor offensive utterances.’ O si sic omnes.

There were a few interesting features of the thing, not least that the character witnesses for Pastor McConnell included (predictably) the DUP’s Sammy Wilson and (less predictably) Fr Pat McCafferty, a Catholic priest and (surprisingly) an imam, Muhammad Al Hussaini, who travelled from London to offer support.