Life Site News reports that in Erlangen, Bavaria, a city court has convicted Lutheran Pastor Johannes Lerle of violating Germany's
Volkverhetzung law that is used to combat Holocaust denial. Lerle was sentenced to one year in jail for comparing abortion in Germany to the murder of innocent Jews in Auschwitz. Commenting on reports of the conviction, the Becket Fund's Angela C. Wu said: "While
Volksverhetzung laws exist in Germany because of its unique history, that is no excuse for illegally violating the international human right to freedom of belief, which must include the right to profess those beliefs, even those of a controversial nature."
UPDATE: In an unusual move, Life Site News on Thursday issued the following
statement:
The LifeSiteNews.com story published Tuesday on the jailing of Pastor Lerle in Germany has been retracted after LifeSiteNews.com was informed that we were working with false information from trusted news sources. While Pastor Lerle has in the past been jailed for anti-abortion activities his current one year imprisonment stemmed solely from charges of holocaust denial and not from comparing abortion to the Nazi Holocaust as we erroneously reported Tuesday.
[Thanks to Patrick Gallagher for the update lead.]
