Jonah Goldberg has a terrific column, “Liberal Hypocrisy on Blasphemous Art,” that recounts chapter and verse of the liberal horror at conservative (and some other) criticism of the public funding of “art” — Serrano’s Christ in piss, Ofili’s Virgin Mary in elephant dung, etc. — that many found offensive and Christians found blasphemous. For example:
In 1989, when the Senate voted to restrict some funding for offensive art, Richard Koshalek, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, told the New York Times that he felt that the vote was “a form of psychological tyranny, trying to put the art world into a state of terror.” Painter Robert Motherwell exclaimed that “for Congress to act as censor is outrageous. The ultimate end is fascism.”
That is a far cry from liberal (and some conservative — yes, Bill O’Reilly, I mean you) responses to Pam Geller’s recent Garland, Texas, event featuring Prophet-mocking cartoons. The earlier critics, after all, did not even demand that the offensive “art” be banned, or try to execute the artists or their sponsors. By contrast, Goldberg notes, all Geller contended is
that in America, people are allowed to say offensive things without risking execution. I am at a loss as to why anyone would disagree with that. But I am utterly baffled how people who think it’s censorship to withdraw funding for anti-Christian “hate speech” can argue that private individuals have no right to express anti-Muslim views.
Some of Geller’s critics do indeed contend that she had no “right” to sponsor such a contest, making a flimsy argument based on an old and seriously defanged Supreme Court case (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942) that words or art that offend some Muslims are “fighting words” not protected by the First Amendment. More interesting, however, are those liberals and others who insist “I believe in the First Amendment, but ….” They believe, or at least claim to believe, that Geller did have a “right” to do what she did, but they blast her for exercising it.
Why? That is, why do argue she should have, in effect, kept her mouth shut even though she had a right to say what she said? So far as I can tell, there are only two reasons:
- Offending people is not polite.
- Offending Muslims incites or at least invites violence.
Really? That is, do these liberals really believe both or either of those reasons?
I don’t think so. Consider: what if some Christians really had responded to Serrano, Mapplethorpe, Ofili, et al. the way some Muslims respond to cartoons of The Prophet, or could have been expected to so respond. Would liberals have concluded that the art should not be displayed, should be taken down, because it’s not polite to offend Christians or that they should be granted a heckler’s veto over what art should be funded or shown?
I repeat: I don’t think so.
But that still leave’s the question: why do liberals think it’s OK to offend Christians but not Muslims?
