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.

&%$#@*&!

Note:  because this post is about swearing, it contains some swear words.  Be thou forewarned.

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I sometimes use some "strong language" in this blog, and every once in a while someone will comment on it.  I try not to make it gratuitous, but there are times when the only intensifier that seems appropriate is one that is... inappropriate.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

For example, I ended my post on the people using Robin Williams's suicide to score philosophical points with the phrase "shut the fuck up."  Could I have phrased it another way?  Sure.  But my opinion (and opinion it is) is that writing is an art form, for which language is the tool.  A writer uses his/her words to effect a response in the reader -- curiosity, anger, understanding, sadness, laughter, or any of a thousand other possibilities.  A careful writer therefore has to choose words that have punch and clarity.  And I would argue that there is no phrase that could be substituted for "shut the fuck up" that has the same dagger-like stab at the heartless individuals who were the subject of that post.

It's a fine line, though.  Swearing can become a habit.  When I was at the University of Washington, I fell in amongst a group of graduate students for whom swearing and obscenity peppered every conversation.  Simple statements were laden with all manner of bad language; you didn't "have to go to class," you "fuckin' had to go to class."  It was all too easy to fall in with that habit to fit in, and for a time I hardly uttered a phrase that didn't have some kind of inappropriate word in it.

And in this context, the word "inappropriate" is exactly the right descriptor.  It was gratuitous, unnecessary, used only to show how Tough and Modern and Rebellious the speaker was.  It added nothing, gave no emotional zing to the language.  It was a filler, no more laden with meaning than "uh" and "um" and "know what I mean?"

It's significant, of course, that so many swear words have sexual connotations, because let's face it: Americans have a hangup about sex.  But I think that labeling of words as "appropriate" or "inappropriate," "clean" or "obscene" goes far deeper than that.

The reality is, whether any language use is appropriate or inappropriate is contextual.  I discuss this at length in my Critical Thinking classes, starting with an example a little like my use of the f-bomb in my post two days ago.  I play for the class the song "Some Nights" by the band Fun, in which there is no "bad language" until the very end:

Five minutes in and I'm bored again
Ten years of this, I'm not sure if anybody understands
This one is not for the folks at home;
Sorry to leave, mom, I had to go,
Who the fuck wants to die alone all dried up in the desert sun?

The song is about war -- something that is not completely apparent unless you watch the music video.  But I would argue that that single use of a swear word turns that last line into a sucker punch, and the lyrics would have less emotional impact by the use of any other word.

As an illustration of how "inappropriateness" is completely contextual, another thing we discuss is the episode from Seinfeld called "The Bet."  In this famous episode, which may be the best-known one in the entire series, Jerry, Elaine, Kramer, and George make a bet over which of them can go the longest without masturbating.  Throughout the entire show, not once does any character use the word "masturbate" or any of its synonyms.  Although the whole show is about a topic that people like the eminent prude Brent Bozell would find distasteful and obscene, the censors couldn't find any legitimate reason to stop it from airing, or even anything to bleep out.

Was "The Bet," in fact, obscene?  The difficulty of answering that question was summed up in 1964 in the case Jacobellis vs. Ohio, which was about whether the movie The Lovers was obscene and deserved to be banned.  The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and in the majority opinion, Justice Potter Stewart said:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

We like everything to fit in neat little boxes with labels.  Words are either appropriate, or they're not; movies, television shows, books, and music are either obscene, or they're not.  Predictably, the reality is much more complex than that.  The impact that any media has on the person consuming it is always contextual, depending on the intent and skill of the person who created the media, and the background, attitudes, intelligence, and sensitivity of the person consuming it.  There are people who have been offended by my occasional use of a "bad word" here on Skeptophilia, and others who have applauded it; only to be expected, when every reader brings a different perspective to a piece of writing.

But I'm not going to apologize for occasionally offending.  As a writer both of essays and fiction, I try to use language with what skill I have, and am careful when choosing words that I know carry a lot of weight.  Sometimes what I intend is for the reader to have a visceral reaction -- whether that reaction is outrage, or a belly laugh from surprise.  If I've achieved that end, I've succeeded, even if I sometimes use a word that would have gotten my mouth washed out with soap when I was ten years old.