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Fight Like Hell for the Right to Draw Muhammad…Then Choose Not to
“Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.”– Jodi Picoult
Let’s get something straight up front. For every terrorist attack, the blame belongs with the attackers. I don’t blame Reagan for the Beirut bombing in 1983, I blame the terrorists. I don’t blame Clinton for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, I blame the terrorists. I don’t blame Bush for 9/11 or Obama for the Boston Marathon bombing. I blame the terrorists.
I cringe at anyone who places blame on a lack of defensive security. I don’t mind a post-attack review of security to ensure a safer America, but not to assign blame to the victim. We shouldn’t need any security at all, but because Islamofascists and other enemies exist, we do.
Similarly, I don’t blame Pamela Geller for the terrorist attack at her “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas on Sunday. I blame the two dead terrorists.
I’ve long been a Pam Geller fan, often steering people to her Atlas Shrugs blog to give them awareness of not only how brutal Islamofascism is to its own people, to women, to gays, to Christians, and Jews, but also to learn how considerably large the number is of Islamists who practice “honor killings,” female genital mutilation, and other horrors. She chronicles the monstrosities the rest of the media ignores.
Like Pam, I too believe the number one threat and problem-maker in the world is radical jihad. I supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As long as Islamofascists are fighting against us (ISIS, al-Qaeda, etc.) we ought to be fighting against them.
I also understand, as Pam Geller does, that there may be millions of Muslims who don’t want to kill us. The media offers that like I’m supposed to be grateful. I’m not. They owe us that. However, the number of Muslims who do want to kill us isn’t small (a constant media misrepresentation is that it is small). We aren’t talking about a lone wolf, a rogue actor, a cell, a small group, or a fledgling movement. Jihadists who want us dead run entire nations with armies, navies, tanks, guns, planes, and bombs.
Sure there are some patriotic American Muslims. Let me introduce you to Cpl. Kareem Kahn.
This is a picture of his mother hugging his gravestone. He lived two towns south of me. After 9/11 he joined the military and said he did so specifically to make the point that Muslims should fight against Islamic terrorism. Point taken, Corporal, and our enduring thanks are with you.
I don’t use him as an exemplar to say, “See, this is how all moderate Muslims really act.” By and large they don’t. I use him as an example of how moderate Muslims should act, but I don’t see them doing that. Cpl. Kahn is the standard they just aren’t meeting.
Some people, like our President Barack H. Obama (pbuh), like to say that these jihadist terrorists aren’t really Islamic, they are bastardizing Islam. Well, they aren’t bastardizing Christianity and they aren’t bastardizing Judaism. That should make them an embarrassment to all other Muslims. This cancer is under their religious skins, not mine. It’s up to them to speak against Islamofascism, work against it, fight it and kill it. We’ll be glad to help since we are the target, but I just don’t see enough Cpl. Kahns coming out of the oft-heralded peaceful Muslim community, in this or other countries.
After two terrorists tried to kill Pam Geller on Sunday, I should have seen Muslims falling over themselves to stand with her in solidarity. Instead I read nothing but criticism of her, even from non-Muslims. Good grief. What the hell is America coming to?
I hope I disabused anyone of the notion that I’m not hawkish against America’s enemies, as I now wish to discuss why I don’t like the idea of a “Draw Muhammad” contest. Pam Geller isn’t the first to do this. Recall Molly Norris and her “Everyone Draw Muhammad Day,” which I objected to on Ricochet as well.
Islamofascists don’t hate me because they are Muslim. They hate me because I’m not Muslim. They are beyond intolerant of my religion, and I don’t want to exist on their plane by being intolerant of anyone else’s religion (to which I have Cpl. Kahn in mind, not them). I must remain better than them in all things, religious toleration and manner of speech included.
While I despised the artist Serrano’s work “Piss Christ” and Chris Ofili’s work “Holy Virgin Mary” (showing the blessed mother surrounded in elephant dung and pornographic images), I knew my recourse against them is the marketplace of ideas, not bullets or beheadings. Yet I certainly don’t wish to join Serrano and Ofili in disrespecting the sacred images of others. Why would I want to be Cpl. Kahn’s Serrano? To prove the First Amendment exists to someone else? I’m armed with too many good words and ideas to stoop to being another’s blasphemer.
Islamofascists have no respect for my religion or my right to have it. They wish to demoralize my religion and strip me of it, and then make me wear Islam like a straitjacket. I don’t want to be like them.
I also don’t want to be like Barack Obama, who is on an offensive against Christianity the likes of which none of us has seen from an American President. Every time the subject of Islamofascist terror comes up, he brings up the 1,200-year-old Crusades in a whirling dervish of relativistic spin. What he fails to admit is that the enemy back then was voracious Islamic jihadists pushing their way West, turning churches into mosques and establishing by force their religious caliphate governments over unwilling Christians, as they did in the area of modern Spain, for example. I guess some things never change. We are still fighting the same enemy with their same goals. Unlike Obama, I can separate the good from the bad here. Islamofascists are the bad.
My problem with drawing Muhammad is that it is a very low form of speech. It is an attempt at insulting irreverence toward a religion or even at blasphemy (I understand that word can be subjective). In short, it has us acting like them. We are scorning their religion for no other purpose than proving we have the free will and legal right to do that. We do… but when else does our side, conservatives in particular, take an anti-religious stance? Even our conservative atheists don’t do that.
Pam Geller has no real interest in the finer aesthetics of historical and contemporary artwork involving Muhammad. Her art show was a pretext to be “provocative,” as in to seek a response. It’s unassailably true that she calculated a very high risk that the response would be violent, evidenced by her spending $50,000 on armed security, a swat team and bomb squad. Of course she was right, as she knows the enemy better than our own President.
Whether she meant to or not, she accomplished something very valuable – she proved that either ISIS or ISIS wannabes (same murderous thing) are here in America. There had been no real confirmation of that, but she laid the bait and caught the animals. Now no one in the Obama administration can still claim ISIS isn’t our main worry instead of the Crusades. I hope.
It’s not lost on me why she did it. If all things were equal I don’t think Pam intends blasphemy, sacrilege or irreverence toward anyone. She knows when a Jehovah’s Witness is turned away from her door, or she refuses an Evangelical’s request for cash on television, or ignores a Hare Krishna at the airport, none of those folks will try to kill her. Islamofascists are doing just that to others around the globe and they tried to kill her Sunday.
Pam has an American urge to fight back. I get that. She did. She made her point. If no Muslim tried to kill anyone, my money says Pam never draws Muhammad. That’s why she isn’t bothering to provoke Jehovah’s Witnesses. She’s calling out the aggressors.
What I suggest she do now is take her well-made point and not do this again, as a way of returning to her perch far above them on the decent human scale. Let’s put aside that baiting the hook with our friends is fraught with peril. Instead lets prove our American exceptionalism; our sublime use of language and civilized communication.
We can’t prove any points by having more draw Muhammad contests. Where would that end? Shall we draw one on Cpl. Kahn’s tombstone? Or on our own? Shall our legacy be, “Here lies the winner of the blasphemy contest?” Do we want that for ourselves? If we are going to set insult, blasphemy and sacrilege as our low bar, then are we not a mere deviation away from a Kristallnacht against Muslim owned businesses, mosques and homes? How low are we willing to let ISIS drag us?
A laudable goal would be to get others to accept the virtues of free speech, but I’m certain that a poor commercial for it is teaching them first that insults are as protected as compliments. They certainly are, but that’s a terrible attempt at persuasive advocacy.
It’s not lost on me how difficult convincing these people of anything will be. There is always going to be a huge challenge to assimilating Islamic people who have lived with dictators and Sharia law into American culture. I’m not sure it’s possible.
There is a distinct cultural difference that comes from a nation with Christian lineage than an Islamic one. Americans are rapt in the free will endowed upon us by our Creator, and love our country not only for its religions founders who escaped Europe and the Star Chamber, but also for weaving the thread of free will and free religion throughout our founding documents. As a matter of history (religion too, of course) that lineage comes from the resurrection of Jesus, whose life informed the enlightenment period philosophers, whose work informed America’s founding fathers.
People from countries with medieval Islamic lineage have no enlightened period from which to draw an understanding of the value of the individual and his free will. America is just not a good fit for them. Perhaps it can’t be. The cultural divide may be too wide.
Look at the mistake Lebanon made with a faulty attempt at assimilating Muslims. Lebanon was once a majority Christian nation that was thriving and Beirut was the jewel of the Middle East. After the creation of Israel, they opened their borders to Palestinians who they hoped would assimilate into Lebanese culture. They didn’t. As their immigrant numbers grew, with it grew the military and political strength to basically conquer Lebanon from within, and they turned it into another Middle Eastern hellhole. We’d be smart to take a lesson from that and start gearing immigration policy toward the likelihood of assimilation based upon shared values.
Perhaps we will always be in a state of war with Islamofascists and nothing will convince them to give up murder of outsiders and oppression of their own insiders. Until we settle on that realization, we must continue to lead the race for better ideas.
Degrading religious symbols won’t due as one of our identifiers. It’s un-American and uncivilized at its core. It’s legal, mind you, and yes I’d die for anyone’s right to disparage religion. However, my dying words are equally permitted to be, “Hey Pam Geller, how about you raise our discourse to a superior place?”
I know that one point of the First Amendment is to protect the expression of the worst of ideas. That doesn’t mean we have put those ideas in practice to prove it.
Look at Charlie Hebdo. Had 12 of them not been killed and they laid before us their usual work of drawing nuns getting raped by priests using crucifixes, none of us would consider them artists, rather useless, juvenile insult-makers.
No wonder 200 writers are boycotting Charlie Hebdo’s receipt of a PEN American award for “Courage in Free Speech.” PEN American confuses vulgarity with award-worthy speech. Were any of their drawings really courageous?
I suppose if I were to walk through the poorest section of Baltimore yelling the N-word, I can get shot and killed too. Would that in any way make me courageous? Must I do so to prove I may? Would my death elevate my speech to award-worthy? I see no difference between that and Charlie Hebdo, but I do note that their editor strained all credibility yesterday by saying Charlie Hebdo drawing Muhammad was different than Pam Geller drawing Muhammad. I understand he said so with a straight face. The only difference I see is that Pam thankfully didn’t die.
Like Pope Francis said after the Charlie Hebdo attack, “One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people’s faith, one cannot make fun of faith. If a dear friend were to utter a swear word against my mother, he’s going to get a punch in the nose. That’s normal.”
That quote bothered people. Americans in particular hold our free speech rights dear, so the thought that anyone might punch us for words is troubling. Of course punching is still frowned upon; however, America has always had a “fighting words” exception to free speech. “Fighting words” aren’t protected by the Constitution.
In CHAPLINSKY v. STATE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE, 315 U.S. 568 (1942), the Supreme Court upheld the arrest of a man under the “fighting words” exception to the First Amendment, when he called a police officer a racketeer and a fascist. The Court held:
It is well understood that the right of free speech is not absolute at all times and under all circumstances. There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which has never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting” words — those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality. “Resort to epithets or personal abuse is not in any proper sense communication of information or opinion safeguarded by the Constitution, and its punishment as a criminal act would raise no question under that instrument.”
Strange concept in exception to the First Amendment – criminalizing face-to-face words of confrontation.
I do note that in all cases that have gone before Supreme Court under the fighting words doctrine since then, the prosecution has failed, so the obvious trend is toward expanding free speech. Chaplinsky has not been over turned so it is still good law, but it is barely law. See, TERMINIELLO V. CITY OF CHICAGO , 337 U.S. 1 (1949) (conviction for anti-Semitic remarks at a rally overturned); COHEN v. CALIFORNIA, 403 U.S. 15 (1971) (wearing shirt to court reading “[Expletive] the Draft” deemed not fighting words); GOODING v. WILSON, 405 U.S. 518 (1972) (conviction overturned after yelling “White son of a [expletive], I’ll kill you,” and “You son of a [expletive], I’ll choke you to death” because the statute in question outlawed more than fighting words); the same reasoning was used in LEWIS v. CITY OF NEW ORLEANS, 415 U.S. 130 (1974) and HOUSTON v. HILL, 482 U.S. 451 (1987).
If you have a fear that the Court might someday uphold a law banning the drawing of Muhammad, fear not. That would be nearly identical to the cross burning case of R.A.V. v. ST. PAUL, 505 U.S. 377 (1992). There the St. Paul, Minn., Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance, prohibited the display of a symbol, as follows:
Whoever places on public or private property, a symbol, object, appellation, characterization or graffiti, including, but not limited to, a burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender commits disorderly conduct and shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
Sounds like one could include a Muhammad drawing in that list.
Justice Scalia found the law unconstitutional, most notable in these paragraphs:
Although the phrase in the ordinance, “arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others,” has been limited by the Minnesota Supreme Court’s construction to reach only those symbols or displays that amount to “fighting words,” the remaining, unmodified terms make clear that the ordinance applies only to “fighting words” that insult, or provoke violence, “on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender.” Displays containing abusive invective, no matter how vicious or severe, are permissible unless they are addressed to one of the specified disfavored topics. Those who wish to use “fighting words” in connection with other ideas — to express hostility, for example, on the basis of political affiliation, union membership, or homosexuality — are not covered. The First Amendment does not permit St. Paul to impose special prohibitions on those speakers who express views on disfavored subjects.
Then this:
As explained earlier, the reason why fighting words are categorically excluded from the protection of the First Amendment is not that their content communicates any particular idea, but that their content embodies a particularly intolerable (and socially unnecessary) mode of expressing whatever idea the speaker wishes to convey. St. Paul has not singled out an especially offensive mode of expression—it has not, for example, selected for prohibition only those fighting words that communicate ideas in a threatening (as opposed to a merely obnoxious) manner. Rather, it has proscribed fighting words of whatever manner that communicate messages of racial, gender, or religious intolerance. Selectivity of this sort creates the possibility that the city is seeking to handicap the expression of particular ideas. That possibility would alone be enough to render the ordinance presumptively invalid, but St. Paul’s comments and concessions in this case elevate the possibility to a certainty.
Of course you also get a couple of lines only Scalia can summon:
St. Paul has no such authority to license one side of a debate to fight freestyle, while requiring the other to follow Marquess of Queensberry rules.
And then:
Let there be no mistake about our belief that burning a cross in someone’s front yard is reprehensible. But St. Paul has sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the First Amendment to the fire.
It appears then that any fear about the necessity to protect Pamela Geller’s right to draw Muhammad is misplaced. I only object to her willingness to do so.
I know that in a free society with free speech, it comes with the territory that occasionally you have to take one on the chin. America is obviously forgetting that, particularly with the rise of this silliness called “micro-aggressions” and the like. I acknowledge oversensitivity exists. There really is no agreed-upon yardstick for what is legitimately speech of bad manners and what is oversensitivity toward otherwise innocuous speech.
I know that many don’t understand how drawing a cartoon is sacrilege, me included. However, if Serrano didn’t think “Piss Christ” was sacrilege, does his conclusion delegitimize my claim that it was?
“South Park” skillfully pointed out that Muslims are holding us to an undefined standard, when they drew Muhammad in a bear suit and basically asked if that is still a drawing of Muhammad. Touché.
At least on matters of religion, I prefer to be deferential to the aggrieved, accepting that I really might not understand them as Serrano misunderstood me. What does it cost me if I maintain my right to say, draw or do something but avoid doing it for the sake of another’s feelings? Nothing.
So I would fight like hell for the right to draw Muhammad. I would die for Pam Geller’s right to do it and would fight a war to kill her aggressors. But toward the good ends of being civilized in a plural society, I choose not to draw Muhammad, for the same reason I refuse to call someone the “N” word.
Published in Culture, Law
Really? You get into fights over things like that?
Have you ever been accosted by a Jew for eating ham yourself? I haven’t.
I have relatives that are Mormon. They offer me caffeinated beverages when I’m at their house.
Nobody (muslims excepted) that I’ve ever run into has a big problem with me doing things that they personally disagree with. That’s sort of the epitome of Western Civilization and tolerance, isn’t it?
With respect to the argument that the level of the conversation should be raised, I think the notion that we are having a conversation at all is incorrect.
If the response to a drawing of Mohammad is gunfire, the two sides are not really talking. You are not having a conversation if the response is attempted murder. Saying hurtful things to people who try to kill you is way in-bounds at almost any level of crudeness.
Even if you wanted to be polite, I don’t think you can do it as long as the threat of violence over the pictures still exists. It would only encourage those that want to impose their will by force and continue to push their luck.
I appreciate that there is collateral offense to people who may be our allies who find the pictures hurtful, but would never resort to violence as a means of objection. I would say that we should work together to eliminate their murderous co-religionists and we’ll scale back our support for such displays. (I don’t think I could wholly say that depiction of Mohammad are always inappropriate, e.g. classical depictions already mentioned.)
I’ll say it: Depictions of Mohammad are never inappropriate in the public square, if you’re not Muslim yourself.
If freedom of religion means anything, it means I don’t have to abide by the restrictions of a religion that I don’t practice. And practitioners of that religion have no right to insist that I abide by their restrictions when I’m not in their private space, whether they ask politely, or at the point of a gun.
Nobody is talking about invading Muslim churches, or private homes of Muslims and forcing them to look at, display or create pictures of Mohammed.
Quinn said:
“I appreciate that there is collateral offense to people who may be our allies who find the pictures hurtful, but would never resort to violence as a means of objection. I would say that we should work together to eliminate their murderous co-religionists and we’ll scale back our support for such displays. ”
I think we agree there. I Just think it would be easier to make that alliance without drawing Muhammad for the purpose of provocation.
I still maintain also that the burden of making that alliance is on the moderate Muslims. Radical Islam is their problem first. It isn’t radical Christianity.
Freedom of speech means I can be as rude as I like, almost whenever I feel. Some people get it from me with both barrels, but some times, I exercise good manners.
When the Islamic world earns good manners on the subject, I think I could cool my enthusiasm for some of the more offensive depictions. Never to the point of banning, but something similar to my distaste about some of cruder depictions of Christianity or Judaism.
But not one second before that is earned.
I’m Jewish, keep kosher and have no problem with non-Jews eating a ham sandwich around me. I’ll even bring them a paper plate.
Nobody drew a picture of Mohammed and rubbed Cpl. Khan’s mother’s nose in it.
People rented space, wisely paid for security, put up some cartoons (the whole event was videoed if you want to watch it) and Muslim vigilantes tried to kill them. Not for being rude; for violating Muslim religious law because as far as they’re concerned that law by rights applies to all mankind. When Muslim activists do it to advance the rule of Sharia, Muslim activists are fine with being rude. To kufar.
The FBI didn’t watch the US born Garland terrorist that closely because there are so many guys out there like him: views, internet activity, etc. Feel better yet?
Right now no, because no one cares if you cover yourself in chocolate sauce in the name of art.
If a new group appeared on the scene that threatened to murder anyone who covered themselves in chocolate sauce, and someone tried it and they drove her into hiding, then someone published a magazine featuring pictures of naked models covered in chocolate sauce and a few months later someone gunned down the entire staff of the magazine, and then we all had a conversation and agreed that while we have the right to cover ourselves in chocolate sauce no one should ever do it ever again lest someone take offense — then yes, in that case we absolutely would lose the right.
The context and sequence of events is crucial.
Define “the public square.”
Pamela Geller did not put her cartoons up on a billboard in Mecca, she held a privately-funded event in rented space in Texas. If that counts as “the public square” then so does every gallery, theater, or book store in the world. Do you apply the same standard of “civilized discourse” to every work of art or entertainment offered for public consumption?
Mr De Seno, your apparent decision to decline to answer my request that you explain your claim about me leads me to the conclusion that you’re satisfied to make words up and attribute them to me. That does, indeed, leave us stuck.
Have a nice evening.
Eric Hines
Nobody…has a big problem with me doing things that they personally disagree with. That’s sort of the epitome of Western Civilization and tolerance, isn’t it?
Indeed. And if they find what I’m doing rude, the proper responses include explaining to me my error, or rudeness back.
Proper responses do not include attempts to murder me and anyone around me.
Eric Hines
But there’s a huge difference between inappropriate and illegal. Tommy isn’t arguing for this to be illegal.
Yes, and the piss Christ people did the same thing. Sure, it was legal. It was inappropriate and a bad use of free speech too.
We can exercise our rights even in the face of threats without resorting to dumb stunts, as Casey put it so succinctly.
Yes, I do apply the same standard. Conservatives lament the decline of the culture all the time, and we’re right to do so even if some crazy or murderous bastard happens to agree.
Who here is claiming that’s a proper response?
Do you watch South Park? Is it “inappropriate and a bad use of free speech?”
Sometimes it’s inappropriate. Often, I suppose. Sure, it’s funny. No one would sin if it were unappealing, though. Well placed barbs are one thing, but I do tend to tire of snark, cynicism, mockery, and irony pretty quickly. I also think that this isn’t what the founders had in mind when they wrote that amendment.
So is it your view then that Trey Parker and Matt Stone should have chosen not to make South Park in the first place?
The Founders knew all about sharp elbows.
It’s my view that I’d have preferred the piss Christ artist to refrain from that particular project. But so what? Do I then have to be against any expression? I don’t think that follows.
With South park, yes I do think they have gone beyond what I’d prefer from time to time. I do think their medium is sophomoric and it doesn’t appeal to me like it did when I was sophomoric too. Can’t I disapprove of them, or some of their work, without thinking it should be illegal? Can’t I disapprove while still valuing free speech? Isn’t that disapproval part of free speech?
I agree with you there, I think the founders had in mind political speech, speech critical of the government. Obscenity laws were common and uncontroversial in this country until the 20th century. I suspect many of the founders would be astonished if told that today’s Supreme Court strikes down obscenity laws as unconstitutional but permits campaign finance laws to stand.
I suppose that raises the interesting question: is a cartoon of Muhammad obscene?
Indeed they did. They lived in a more robust time. The Declaration not a polite document.
There is a world of difference between granting an accommodation voluntarily and doing so in response to threats. When you reward behavior you get more of it.
Telling people to self-censor because others might object to their expression not only gives the heckler a veto, it encourages other hecklers.
I’ll return to the example of someone saying vulgar things about your mother. If you threaten to punch that guy in the nose, would you then support the rest of the group jumping in with vulgar comments about your mother, on principle?
The difference being that we can exercise our free speech without being provocative just for the sake of provocation. The founders couldn’t get what they wanted without that declaration. The need to be assertive or even aggressive sometimes is not the same as being sophomoric just to prove you can.
You’ll notice Pam Geller didn’t bother holding a ham sandwich eating competition. Perhaps the comparison is not apt?
Rightly or wrongly, some Muslims see drawing Mohammad as an act of desecration and disrespect – like burning or spitting on a Torah.
Do people have a right to express themselves that way? Yes, probably.
Is a violent response ever justified? Absolutely not.
But that is really what is going on with their response – it’s to desecration. (Unwitting?) And (ego) to insult. (imo intended. Otherwise why bother?)
I did find it a bit disturbing that at least one of the submissions looked like something out of Der Sturmer, but maybe that’s just me being oversensitive. Otoh, could it be that this is what the non-jihadi critics of Geller are responding so negatively to?
My feeling is that cultures are at their most civilised when they include all their people on an equal, fair footing. Sorting people by intrinsic type and then ranking them in or out or higher or lower seems un-civilised – instinctively people understand that it’s destructive, and they don’t want to support it, even if they absolutely support free speech as a core value of civilisation.
Of course. I guess we just have different standards of appropriate/inappropriate. Perhaps I haven’t outgrown my sophomoric phase yet.
In the case in question I thought Bosch Fawstin’s winning drawing was clever and made an important point. I think Pam Geller took a stand for free speech, and put her own life on the line to do so, and I applaud her for that.
Of course you’re free to disapprove, and I’m free to approve. Ain’t freedom great?
Not to me it’s not, but isn’t that part of the responsibilities of freedom: to respect your fellow citizens and not needle them needlessly and to choose to live by standards of civility – and to offer that respect freely?
By respect fellow citizens I don’t mean the murderers; I’m glad they’re no longer with us, and their response to the offense they felt was not only wrong but rightly illegal and unjustified.
If I said something vulgar about someone’s mother and he threatened to punch me in the nose, I’d feel compelled to say something even more vulgar about his mother. But this time behind his back.
I’d bet the piss Christ artist thought the same of his project too. Someone somewhere surely made the same argument: it should be done just because someone is telling you not to do it. If it were worth doing on it’s own merits then I’d go ahead without heeding the threats and entreaties. If it’s not worth doing on it’s own merits then it’s just a middle finger .
And yet we’re at just such a crossroad today, with terrorists threatening and trying to kill us if we don’t submit. We must be assertive or even aggressive–even rudely blunt–in our speech to them, or we lose our rights–we must submit.
There’s nothing “just because” about it (eliding the ones on either side of the question who are, just because–they’re outliers).
Eric Hines