Free speech is under attack on all fronts and incidents like the hoax call to the hospital in London can be leveraged to set bad legal precedents and even pass bad laws. They certainly give insight into the gravitational pull of wider society on such matters as freedom of speech.

The apparent suicide of the London nurse who was on the receiving end of the joke played by two Australian DJs last week is deeply sad. For any human being to consider that life is no longer worth the living is hard for me to understand. For that person to be the mother of two children defies belief. One can only feel very sorry for the family.

What is remarkable, however, is the backlash against the two idiotic jokers. Certainly, the joke was silly (what joke is not silly?) and possibly tasteless (what good joke is tasteful? I doubt that comedians who tell sensible, tasteful jokes go very far in the profession). But was it really sufficient in and of itself to provoke a suicide? Presumably, the inquest will establish precisely what the emotional state of the lady was prior to her death and what factors contributed to her action.

Still, the backlash is an interesting sign that the world is surely becoming an odd place. The internet and reality TV have provided tremendous opportunities for loutish yobbery and the glorification of the crude and the trivial. Strange, is it not, how human beings always seem to find the most degrading or inane uses for the most potentially positive inventions? By way of contrast, society seems to be moving throughout the Western world towards a position where freedom of speech is becoming highly tenuous because such freedom is predicated on the right to offend, to disagree, to be different — the three mortal sins of the public square. So we have two extremes: the crassness of the yob element and the pieties of the politically correct. And as always, the middle is squeezed.

The ranks of the professionally offended seem to grow every day. Jokes that were yesterday funny will today not only lose someone his job but might well make him permanently unemployable, the moral equivalent of a serial killer or an arsonist. Some years ago, I referred to myself in an interview using a certain word (which I cannot use here lest I hurt someone out there, I guess). The PR people went wild and had it pulled immediately. I had not known that the word (up until recently a perfectly acceptable one even in polite company) was now filed under ‘Only Used By Dangerous Sociopaths.’ But even when my ignorance was alleviated, I wondered at the time: whom was I oppressing or hurting by the comment? Could it be me? I was, after all, the only one I had ‘stereotyped in an offensive manner’? Maybe I should have consulted a lawyer? Maybe I should have sued myself? A bit of extra cash is always handy, after all, and someone has to take a stand against people like me.

When one reads that the authorities apparently contemplated starting an investigation to establish whether the Australian DJs should face legal action, one wonders exactly what law they could be deemed to have broken. Making a funny phone call? Speaking in cod English accents that should only really have fooled those Americans who cannot distinguish English from Australian anyway? Being silly radio DJs? Behaving insensitively? They may well have done all of these things, any one of which might be deemed unpleasant, and the events subsequent to the call were undoubtedly tragic; but whether the call was a sufficient cause in and of itself to have provoked the tragedy is a matter for an inquest, not some lunatic mob on Facebook or in the tabloid press, to decide. More importantly, allowing matters of taste to become matters of law would surely be a most subjective and sinister development for society at large.

Free speech is under attack on all fronts and incidents like the hoax call to the hospital in London can be leveraged to set bad legal precedents and even pass bad laws. They certainly give insight into the gravitational pull of wider society on such matters as freedom of speech. When the comedians are under fire, it can only be a matter of time before they come for the religious ministers – the funny ones first, I guess, but I doubt that the humourless can expect an indefinite pass. Tell someone Jesus is the only way of salvation and find that they have gone away and killed themselves, and one day you too might be subject to a criminal investigation

Carl R Trueman is Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has an MA in Classics from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Church History from the University of Aberdeen. This article is reprinted from the Reformation 21 blog and is used with their permission.