No, but …
This is.
Posted on 02/09/2018 4:46:49 PM PST by marshmallow
A court victory for a designer accused of blasphemy
THIS week the European Court of Human Rights handed down a verdict, which law-and-religion pundits will be pondering for years to come. It vindicated Sekmadienis, a company selling the work of Robert Kalinkin, a Lithuanian fashion designer. The seller had been fined for using images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary which Catholics found offensive.
The case refers to a Kalinkin campaign in 2012 which featured a bare-chested young man and a woman, both with halos: the man was sporting jeans and tattoos, and the female figure wore a white dress with a string of beads. The captions consisted of lines such as: “Jesus, what trousers!”, “Dear Mary, what a dress!” and “Jesus, Mary, what are you wearing?”
After receiving some complaints about the images, Lithuania’s State Consumer Protection Agency (SPCA) consulted the bishops of the Catholic church, to which nearly 80% of Lithuanians adhere. This led to Sekmadienis being fined €580 ($723) for, among other things, “encouraging a frivolous attitude towards the ethical values of the Christian faith.”
This week’s ruling by the ECHR, an organ of the 47-nation Council of Europe, found that the company’s freedom of expression had been violated. It accepted that liberty of expression carried certain responsibilities, including a duty not to be “gratuitously offensive or profane” but it considered that the images in question did not fall into that category. It noted that freedom of expression extended to ideas which “offend, shock or disturb”.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
Meanwhile, the guy who put stickers on his car saying things like, “Possess me Jesus,” is morally superior to the girl with a Mary dress?
The key point is what you said-—
“It doesn’t matter.”
Mary’s mother had tats? Well, I swan.
We could understand the stickers more. The best I could say about the clothes would be “confusion.”
I see nothing confusing about the dress in the picture.
It’s actually pretty plain. The court made the right call.
I’d never have pulled the court or government into it. I’m talking at a spiritual level, which neither entity is suited to address.
No, but …
This is.
Yes, ok, and we can be sure the European Court of human rights will ensure everyone has rights to anything and everything, except religion that is!
Keep in mind this Court is the same group of high-principled folks who killed Baby Charlie, and similar verdicts. I know it seems different, but here we see religion and life values, a fine line.
This crass sacrilegious merchant isn’t there trying to hush up the priests and preachers. Or murder anybody. I never was too happy about governments going in for matters that the bible assigns to churches. That’ll degrade both government and church.
I do think that churches ought to be preaching about it, heeding the obvious opportunity to state that physical fabrics don’t make anybody holy.
Also, it’s ungrammatical. “Jeans” is plural, not singular.
Jean is the material; jeans are the pants made therefrom. But I should think that Christians of any denomination would be offended by that image, not merely Catholics.
The tattoos offend me.
Jesus said to take care of your body. Tattoos don’t do that in my opinion.
Right on! Both pictures are actually quite attractive. I wouldn’t be shocked to see those up in a church aiming at young, hip Catholics.
I find them off-putting, at best. It’s an interesting, if unsurprising, phenomenon, though: What almighty God declared good, mankind presumes to “improve” upon (q.v. Leviticus 19:28), a presumption which calls attention to the person, rather than the Creator—truly a sign of the times.
I wonder what the Freedom From Religion Foundation is going to say to Sekmadienis about it.
Or do they only care about the USA.
Our Puerto Rican deacon gave a sermon on the theme, "Jesus era un ranchero." It's just true. Nazareth was the sticks. Not just the sticks, but the (Jewish) fundamentalist sticks. That's why they went ballistic when Jesus rejected Hebrew nationalism in the synagogue.
Huh?
How is this POSSIBLE, for NO ONE knows what these two LOOKED like!
Not the Biblical Mary.
But Rome's 'Mary' has MANY names and titles and is 'famous' for MANY things...
The way it's written:
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.