The right to blaspheme

It's time to quote Voltaire again:

"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

This is a concept that is apparently new to musician and religious activist Pat Boone, who last week called for criminal charges to be filed against Saturday Night Live over a skit ridiculing the Religious Right's insane persecution complex.

In an interview with Alan Colmes, Boone said:

There is a vitriol, I would say there is almost a hatred, of people who dare to take the old-fashioned truisms, the old traditional stands about moral right and wrong.  They absolutely, they do not want any restriction on what they might do...  There have been restrictions, as you know, the movies, there used to be a censor board in the movies that declared what should be appropriate for family audiences and not.  Then they went to a rating system, which is in a way a regulation...  I think the majority of American citizens, and they ought to be the arbiters, not a few people in robes, it ought to be the American people who determine what they want coming into their homes...  There's an FCC, you know that, don't you?  The FCC does make regulations, it's just a question of what they'll declare off limits...  You cannot do blasphemy, yes...  I think 90% of the American public would say, "Yes, I agree."  And if the public doesn't have anything to say about it -- it's the public airwaves...  [A proper punishment for allowing blasphemy on the air would be to] lose license.  Just like any other law, if you disobey the law, you're punished for it, and you lose the ability to keep doing it...  The network, or whoever's responsible for the shows -- there should be regulations, yes, that prohibit blasphemy.  Now of course it's hard to determine what obscenity, what profanity, what blasphemy is.  But to call God by some profane name -- I think anybody with a rational mind would agree that that's blasphemy.  

This is twisting together so many different threads that it's going to take some thought to tease them apart.  But let's give it a try, shall we?

First, there's the conflation of what's on the air and what is approved for family viewing.  Saturday Night Live is clearly not a child-friendly show; no one claims that it is, and it's on at an hour when most younger people are long asleep.  So talking about "family friendly programming" is irrelevant here, unless you want all programming to be appropriate for five-year-olds (and honestly, this sounds kind of like what Pat Boone wants).

Pat Boone [image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

Second, there's the issue that if people object to what's on television, they have an incredibly powerful recourse: turn the fucking thing off.  My wife and I don't have regular television -- we own a TV and use it to watch Netflix and the like, but we made a conscious decision not to get satellite (we're too far out in the middle of nowhere for cable).  This decision is reinforced every time we're in a hotel and we flip the TV on, do the round of the channels (all hundred-some-odd of them) and discover that amazingly enough, all that's on is garbage.  With lots of commercials.  So if Boone et al. don't like what's on Saturday Night Live, they shouldn't watch it.  No one has them tied to a chair with the television on.

Third, though, there's the deeper issue of free speech.  Let's say the tables were turned, and Pat Boone and his evangelical pals were to make a nasty film ridiculing atheists.  (Some would say that's what Harold Cronk's God's Not Dead actually is, in fact -- portraying atheists as ugly-minded people who set out deliberately to destroy the faith of Christians, and who furthermore have thought processes approximately as deep as a kiddie pool.)  I might not like it.  I pretty certainly wouldn't watch it.  After all, I get enough hate mail here, there's no reason why I would want to subject myself to what is basically an hour and a half long screed sneering in the direction of my particular worldview.

But you know what?  My not liking something is not equivalent to my saying that no one can say it.  If you're religious, you have every right to say that atheism is every awful thing you can think of.  You can do anything up to what would amount in the eyes of the law as slander or libel.  (Those are fairly narrowly defined, and shouldn't be hard to avoid.)  I wouldn't be happy about it, but the First Amendment protects your right to say it.

But the last problem is something that Boone himself touches on -- it's impossible to define obscenity, profanity, and blasphemy, because those are (1) based on personal lines that are different for each individual, and (2) often contextual.  A sex scene in a movie, where it contributes to the plot, is (in my opinion) not obscene.  (In fact, I've written sex scenes in a couple of my novels -- in ways, I hope, that are neither obscene nor gratuitous, but genuinely contribute something to the story other than titillation.)  When it comes to profanity, it is entirely situation-dependent, something I explain every year to my students.  The whole thing about swearing, and the real reason why teachers object to it for the most part, is not because it's inherently wrong, but because you have to learn when it's appropriate.  Saying "fuck you" to a buddy in a funny situation, with a smile, could be entirely reasonable and result in no ill feelings.  Saying the same thing to your boss could get you fired.

Best to learn the distinction early, and err on the side of caution when using strong language.

The hardest one of all is blasphemy.  Some people -- apparently, Boone included -- think that any criticism, any ridicule of religion, is blasphemous.  The Saudis agree; people in Saudi Arabia are routinely whipped, jailed, or beheaded for speaking ill of Islam.

I'm not sure we should be following their example, however.

But that's the difficulty, isn't it?  When does criticism of a religion cross the line into hate speech?  The law as it stands is pretty clear; it's hate speech if it implies "immediate danger or an imminent breach of the peace."  Beyond that, you're free to be as critical as you like.

I may or may not like what you say.  But as long as you don't threaten my person, that is completely irrelevant.

Because that's what "free speech" means.

So Boone, as one might expect, is proposing something that contravenes not only the First Amendment, but any standard we have for separation of church and state.  Because face it; he wouldn't be saying this if it were Islam being ridiculed, would he?

Yeah, thought not.

In our current offense-sensitive culture, you have to wonder if we're moving that way.  Boone and his friends have demonstrated over and over that they have a persecution complex, and want Christianity to receive protections from the law that are offered to no other worldview.

It's to be hoped that our leaders will recognize right from the outset what a slippery slope that is.

The right to blaspheme

There is a fundamental difference between criticizing an idea and criticizing a person.

Ideas stand or fall based upon their consonance with the known evidence.  If I believe that aliens have abducted my dogs and replaced them with synthetic life-forms so they can spy on me, that statement is either true or false, and presumably should be resolvable by applying a little science and logic.

Okay, that's a facile example, and I recognize that; but honestly, any statement someone makes can be treated that way.  If you are making a claim about the way the world works, that claim is testable.  More importantly, testing the claim requires that we criticize it, push and prod at it and see where its weaknesses (if any) lie.  If certain realms are made off-limits to criticism, the result is that their truth value can't be analyzed.  They have to be accepted on faith alone -- i.e., without question, whether or not the evidence you have agrees or disagrees.

Which is why British MP Keith Vaz's declaration of support for anti-blasphemy laws is so wildly wrong-headed.

In a discussion over anti-Muslim statements on media, Miqdaad Versi, Assistant Secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, said, "Muslim communities need to be able to respond to accusations [against] Muslims, or against the Prophet, in a more effective way... Whether there should be legislation is something that really is a more complicated question."

Vaz, in response to Versi's comments, went further.  "I have no problem with the re-introduction of anti-blasphemy laws in the UK," Vaz said. "Religions are very special to people.  And therefore I have no objection to [a blasphemy law] … but it must apply equally to everybody.  If there were to be new blasphemy laws, it should apply to all religions.  If we have laws, they should apply to everybody...  If somebody brings it forward in parliament I'll vote for it… Obviously it depends what's in the bill. But I have no objection to it being brought before parliament and having a debate about it."

Which is a dangerous step toward the type of repression of free speech you see in so many places in the world -- the end result of which is a dictatorship like Saudi Arabia, where you can be sentenced to death by beheading for "offending the prophet."  Or, in the case of poet Ashraf Fayadh, simply for bringing to light the government's determination to keep a stranglehold on all forms of free speech.

Don't get me wrong.  Ridiculing people's dearly-held beliefs isn't nice.  But once you start legislating which ideas are off-limits for ridicule, where do you stop?  Is all satire forbidden?  Do all religions fall equally under the hands-off policy?  (That seems to be what Vaz intends, but if you look around the world, it seldom works out that way in practice.)  What about other dearly-held beliefs?  What if someone is a passionate believer in astrology?  Or spirit survival?

Do we really want to try to figure out which ideas merit protection from criticism, and which do not?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Religious claims are, at their basis, no different than any other claim.  By suggesting that we set them aside from criticism, we are making an imaginary distinction, and then trying to legislate behavior regarding which side of the distinction some statement falls.

Note, however, that I'm not talking about true hate speech, in which people or groups are threatened or insulted.  Here, we're talking about ideas.  And in the realm of ideas, free speech has to trump "niceness."  While I might not like it if someone ridicules my atheism (for example), making such speech illegal is the first step down a very troubling path.

I'll end with a quote by one of my favorite writers -- someone more people in our modern, offense-phobic society should read:

Allahu akbar!... or maybe not.

Once again, the fervently religious of our world have shown themselves capable of following the Red Queen's dictum of holding several contradictory thoughts in their heads at once.  In this case, it's Egyptian Muslims, who have jailed yet another person for "blasphemy" and "criticizing Islam."

The radical Muslim element in Egypt has been quick to speak out against the sentence.  It was too lenient, they say -- the man should have been executed.

It's a little perplexing how these folks, and their spiritual brethren the Fundamentalist Christians, can't see the contradiction implicit in their stance.  On the one hand, they are continuously chanting, singing, and shouting from the rooftops about how God is Great and All-Powerful and Omnipotent and Omniscient and Omnipresent and Omni-Various-Other-Stuff, and on the other hand they are so terrified that a brief passage written by a guy on Facebook will destroy Allah's kingdom on earth that they are ready to hang him from the nearest flagpole.

[image courtesy of photographer David Lisbona and the Wikimedia Commons]

The same was true of the witch-hunters in the 17th century, who seemed to believe that the unshakable, self-evident, rock-solid truth of god's word was under serious threat from illiterate, eccentric little old ladies.

Come on, people.  You can't have it both ways.  Either god is powerful, or he's not.  If he's powerful, you have no reason to persecute people for bad-mouthing him; presumably god is capable of handling his own battles, and doesn't need patriarchal, humorless, puritanical bastards like the Shari'a judges to deal with his enemies.  If he's not so powerful -- if, in fact, his revealed truth could be demolished by a couple of paragraphs of mild criticism -- then I have to wonder why you think he's worthy of worship.  Either way, both can't be true simultaneously.

Oh, wait, perhaps there's a third option?  Maybe all of this stuff was made up by power-hungry patriarchs to keep the power structure intact, the money flowing in, and the women in line, and in actuality there is no god!  Gotta wonder.

In any case, you also have to wonder why so few people are willing to stand up and say this. Lots of folks are willing to address the human rights aspects (torturing and executing people isn't nice) but very few people are willing to deal with the larger issue, which is that these people are morally bankrupt.  A religion or a system of ethics which is based upon coercion (mental or physical), is simply an excuse for the powerful to remain powerful.  It isn't true, it isn't worthy of respect, and it isn't a reflection of the divine.  It is simply an embodiment of all that is bad about human nature -- the desire to dominate solely because we're in a position where we can.

It's the same with a lot of the issues between the Christians and politicians these days, isn't it?  You hear from people who aren't happy that the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage that heterosexual marriage is "under attack".  The ranting you hear from the pulpits seems to claim that now that gay marriage is legal, all of these straight people are going to run right out and tie the knot with someone of the same sex, and that will open the door for heaven knows what.  In a year or two we'll probably have people marrying various marine invertebrates.  You know, if you think that sexual preference is really that fluid, you have to question why your god would have made it that way.  Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that if your worldview is based upon fear, then any amount of rationality won't get in the way of your adopting moronic stances to shore up your beliefs.

Of course, some people believe that there's god's evil twin, Satan or Lucifer or whatever, who is actively trying to corrupt people by using others to spread wrong belief.  Even if you think that's true, however, isn't it still supposedly the case that god is stronger than Satan, and correct beliefs are inherently more attractive and virtuous than incorrect ones?  If so, then once again, what the hell are you so worried about?

So once more, we have the devoutly religious of the world adopting a stance which is so patently ridiculous that if it were fiction, no one would believe it was plausible; and most of the world's political leaders doing nothing but tsk-tsking in their direction for "not being nice."  It would be wonderful if one, just one, of them would stand up and say, "You know what, Egyptian leaders?  We are no longer in the Middle Ages.  We stopped burning witches three hundred years ago.  That's because doing that sort of thing was based upon stupid, backward superstition.  Grow up, you idiotic bastards, and join the 21st century.  If criticism is really such a threat to your beliefs, it probably means that your beliefs are simply wrong."

But no one will, of course.

Hallmark, censorship, and the culture of persecution

So apparently, someone over at the Hallmark Channel thought it'd be a good idea to censor out the word "god" in their broadcast of the movie It Could Happen to You.

The backlash was immediate and vitriolic.  The Facebook page for Hallmark Channel USA erupted in comments like the following:

I watch you [sic] channel all the time. WHY DID YOU BLEEP OUT THE WORK [sic] GOD IN THE MOVIE IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU.  Same [sic] on you.....Without GOD you would have no network. 

REALLY HALLMARK!!!!  BLEEPING OUT THE WORD GOD!!!!  HAVE WE FORGOTTEN THAT YOU USED TO BE A CHRISTIAN NETWORK!!!  WTH!!!  HOW ABOUT NOT OFFENDING CHRISTIANS!!!! 

We are very disappointed in Hallmark's decision to delete the word GOD from their presentation of "IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU"...  We will wait for Hallmark to issue a public apology before resuming our support of the Hallmark Channel etc... 

Why did you bleep out the word God from the movie "It Can Happen To You" broadcast today? I think it is time to block your channel. You make a lot of money off the rising of God's only son who died and rose again day of rising [sic], yet you bleep his Name.  I am beyond disgusted. 

Some freak High on pot says it was ok for them to do this.  I bet he collects a check on our dime.  This is exactly what is wrong.  When you are high~~you think you are god! 

I am so furious and upset. I am sick and tired of "god" offending people.  Hallmark has some explaining to do!  I have written Glenn Beck, Bill O' and Hannity.  This country is so far gone!

Marvelous.  Go ahead and tell Hannity, Beck, et al., and they'll make a capital case out of it, giving the pathological persecution-culture that is becoming more and more common amongst American Christians further fertilizer to grow on.

And fertilizer it is, friends, as in the bovine variety.  Because the reason that Hallmark censored the word "god" in It Could Happen to You wasn't because they were trying to eliminate the mention of a deity from the movie; it was because it occurred in the phrases "oh my god" and "I swear to god," and therefore constituted biblically-forbidden instances of taking the Lord's Name In Vain.  Yup -- that's right; they didn't bleep out "god" because it was holy, but because it wasn't holy enough.

[image courtesy of photographer Kevin Probst and the Wikimedia Commons]

And it's not the first time this sort of thing has happened.  Back in 2002, a mention of "Jesus" by the co-host of The View (in the context of saying "Thank you, Jesus," for her losing weight) was censored out on similar grounds, leading to a petition by outraged Christians who thought that this constituted suppression of religion.  In 2007, an ABC censor mistakenly bleeped out all mentions of the word "god" in the in-flight version of the movie The Queen, because he thought it contravened the rules against blasphemous use of religious language.

Each time, censors erred not because they were trying to offend, but because they evidently knew that these people have the sensibilities of petulant children.  For all the good it did.  If there's nothing to be angry about, they'll find something.  The phrase "damned if you do, damned if you don't," comes to mind.

Okay, I know that Hollywood is a pretty liberal place, and that much of what's on the air these days is there because of its capacity to shock (Family Guy, I'm looking at you).  But picking on The Hallmark Channel?  Really?  The network that was created from the merger of the American Christian Television System and the Vision Interfaith Satellite Network?  You'd think that someone watching a movie on Hallmark would take for granted that whatever was being done was somehow motivated by an attempt to honor Christian values.  I mean, I can see assuming the worst of Syfy or Comedy Central, but Hallmark?

I found out about this from a Facebook post, where I saw yet another comment by an outraged Christian, to wit: "14% atheists in the US, and 71% Christians, and for some reason we're letting the atheists run the show!"  Which might qualify as the single most moronic statement I've seen in months.  "Run the show?"  Being an atheist in the United States pretty much automatically dumps you into the category of "politically powerless."  If we were running the show, do you seriously think that there would be a bill that looks likely to pass in Louisiana declaring the bible to be "the official state book?"  Would there be a bill still in conference in South Carolina declaring that the mammoth is the official state fossil -- and that it was created on the Sixth Day?  Would the governor of Iowa have just signed a proclamation stating that July 14, 2014, be set aside as a "day of thoughtful prayer and humble repentance according to II Chronicles 7:14?"

Running the show, my ass.

Censor that, Hallmark.

Blasphemy, leaky plumbing, and the Weeping Cross of India

It is an interesting distinction, and one many people seem to be unable to recognize -- that there is a difference between being victimized and simply being told that you're demonstrably wrong.

I remember, for example, a former student of mine, a young African American woman who had a chip on her shoulder so big she could have used a visit to a chiropractor, who was in one of my math classes.  She routinely failed exams -- whether from lack of effort or from lack of ability was hard to tell -- but her low grades finally resulted in a parent conference.  During the conference, her mother said that her low grades in math were due to one thing: the fact that I was a racist.  I was giving her daughter low grades, she said, because I was prejudiced against African Americans, and considered them "less intelligent."

I tried (unsuccessfully) to point out that my attitudes toward people of other races had little relevance, especially given that this was a math class -- the girl was seemingly incapable of solving algebra problems correctly.  My marking a problem wrong had nothing to do with her race; anyone who had tried to solve the problem that way would have been marked wrong.

Of course, it made no difference.  People who make a career out of being victims have remarkably little respect for facts and logic.  Whether she thought that her daughter's wrong answers would have magically become right if her math teacher had had darker skin is a matter of conjecture, but that's certainly what it sounded like.

Which brings us to the case of the Weeping Cross of India.  (Source)

In the Church of Our Lady of Velankanni, in Mumbai, there is a cross that began to drip water one day, resulting in a steady trickle that collected at the feet of the figure of Jesus.  Devout Catholics pronounced it a miracle, and began to show up by the hundreds to collect the "tears" in vials, stating that it was "holy water" and could heal people who were anointed with it.  Local church leaders jumped right on the bandwagon, circulating photographs of the miraculous statue, and encouraging everyone to come and witness the phenomenon.

One of the people who did is Sanal Edamaruku, president of Rationalist International.  He came to Mumbai on March 10, and after a brief investigation he discovered what was happening; a water pipe in an adjoining washroom had sprung a leak, saturating the wall behind the crucifix.  The water was being wicked up through the porous material of the cross, eventually seeping out and dripping onto Jesus' feet.

You'd think that the Catholic leaders would have a good laugh at themselves, and then hired a plumber, wouldn't you?  You'd be wrong.  Five church leaders, including Father Augustine Palett, the pastor of the church that houses the crucifix, were interviewed by a local news program and demanded that Edamaruku apologize for his "hostility."  He refused, and held his own news conference in which he explained his position, and described how the phenomenon had a purely natural explanation.  The priests responded by demanding that local law enforcement officials arrest Edamaruku for blasphemy, under a clause of Indian penal code that one may not "hurt the sentiments of a particular religious community."  As of this writing, the police are trying to locate and arrest Edamaruku, so far without success, so I'm uncertain as to how this story will end.

What occurs to me is, can these people really not see that there's a difference between being harassed and simply being wrong?  Edamaruku didn't say that the Catholics were bad people, or that they should be discriminated against; he simply said that they had made a mistake.  This is no more blasphemy than my marking my long-ago student's algebra problems wrong was racism.

And as far as India's anti-blasphemy law, under which Edamaruku may well soon be arrested; is it really reasonable that anyone should be able to claim anything, without challenge, simply by the expedient of adding, "and that's my religious belief?"  A statement that is factual in nature can presumably be verified, and its correctness determined by some means that is the same for everyone.  (This is called science, by the way.)  The water in the crucifix either is appearing by miraculous means, or it is not.  Edamaruku determined that it was not.  You do not suddenly turn the claim of its being a miracle into a factual statement by saying, "Oh, but it is my religious belief that the water isn't coming from a leaky pipe!" -- any more than 2 + 2 = 5 as long as you aren't a racist.