Order (Scotland) Act 2021 received royal assent on 23 April 2021. The abolition of the common law of blasphemy will take effect when section 16 of the Act is brought into force by commencement order Humanists UK, that had been campaigning for repealing Scotland's blasphemy law since 2015, welcomed the bill. United States A prosecution for blasphemy in the United States would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution, and no blasphemy laws exist at the federal level. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution (adopted in 1791) provides: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ... Before winning their independence from the British Empire in the late 18th century, some of the British colonies in North America such as the Province of Massachusetts Bay had blasphemy laws. The 1791 First Amendment effectively put an end to them in the new American republic. Because of the First Amendment's protection of free speech and religious exercise from federal interference, and the Supreme Court's extension of those protections against state regulation, the United States and its constituent state governments may not prosecute blasphemous speech or religious insults and may not allow civil actions on those grounds. In Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1952 that New York could not enforce a censorship law against filmmakers whose films contained "sacrilegious" content. The opinion of the Court, by Justice Clark, stated that: From the standpoint of freedom of speech and the press, it is enough to point out that the state has no legitimate interest in protecting any or all religions from views distasteful to them which is sufficient to justify prior restraints upon the expression of those views. It is not the business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine, whether they appear in publications, speeches, or motion pictures. The United States and some individual state jurisdictions provide for stronger criminal penalties for crimes when committed against a person because of that person's religious or some other affiliations. For instance, Section 3A1.1 of the 2009 United States Sentencing Guidelines states that: "If the finder of fact at trial or, in the case of a plea of guilty or nolo contendere, the court at sentencing determines beyond a reasonable doubt