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If someone made cartoons that ridiculed your religious beliefs, would you:
a) riot and kill innocent people, insisting the cartoonists be legally punished or lynched?
b) distance yourself from the cartoons and say: "Religious beliefs are sacred to people, and at all times should be respected and honored"?
c) say the cartoons are in bad taste but protected by democratic principles of free speech?
d) draw a nasty cartoon about the cartoonists?
If you were Issac Hayes, the Scientologist who played Chef on "South Park" but quit the show on religious grounds, your answer would be "b."
Unfortunately, Hayes also said: "As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices." Trey Parker and Matt Stone noted that Hayes had not objected to any of their previous shows making fun of religion (including the one last season that featured a marble statue of a Catholic idol that bled "miraculously" out her posterior. In a statement on the "South Park Studios" web site, they said:
This has nothing to do with intolerance and bigotry and everything to do with the fact that Isaac Hayes is a Scientologist and that we recently featured Scientology in an episode of "South Park." In ten years and over 150 episodes of 'South Park,' Isaac never had a problem with the show making fun of Christians, Muslims, Mormons and Jews. He got a sudden case of religious sensitivity when it was his religion featured on the show. To bring the civil rights struggle into this is just a non-sequitur. Of course we will release Isaac from his contract and we wish him well.I'm sure Hayes was under no pressure whatsoever from the Scientology organization. (Insert sarcasm here.) But if he were really understood what it means to be a "civil rights activist," he might respect what Ronald Dworkin called, in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, "The Right to Ridicule."
"Ridicule is a distinct kind of expression; its substance cannot be repackaged in a less offensive rhetorical form without expressing something very different from what was intended. That is why cartoons and other forms of ridicule have for centuries, even when illegal, been among the most important weapons of both noble and wicked political movements," writes Dworkin.
So in a democracy no one, however powerful or impotent, can have a right not to be insulted or offended. That principle is of particular importance in a nation that strives for racial and ethnic fairness. If weak or unpopular minorities wish to be protected from economic or legal discrimination by law—if they wish laws enacted that prohibit discrimination against them in employment, for instance—then they must be willing to tolerate whatever insults or ridicule people who oppose such legislation wish to offer to their fellow voters, because only a community that permits such insult as part of public debate may legitimately adopt such laws. If we expect bigots to accept the verdict of the majority once the majority has spoken, then we must permit them to express their bigotry in the process whose verdict we ask them to accept. Whatever multiculturalism means—whatever it means to call fo increased "respect" for all citizens and groups—these virtues would be self-defeating if they were thought to justify official censorship....Now, Hayes wasn't saying there oughtta be a law against the "South Park" brand of religious ridicule. And, in fact, he didn't even play a role in the ridicule of Scientology on the "Trapped in the Closet" episode (which is repeated in the US on Comedy Central Wednesday, March 15 -- though, as previously reported, Tom Cruise has prevented this episode from being shown in the UK). But it's pretty appalling for anyone who considers himself a "civil rights activist" to claim that religion should be treated differently from any other subject -- politics, race, sexuality, whatever -- when it comes to free speech.
It is often said that religion is special, because people's religious convictions are so central to their personalities that they should not be asked to tolerate ridicule of their beliefs, and because they might feel a religious duty to strike back at what they take to be sacrilege. Britain has apparently embraced that view because it retains the crime of blasphemy, though only for insults to Christianity. But we cannot make an exception for religious insult if we want to use law to protect the free exercise of religion in other ways. If we want to forbid the police from profiling people who look or dress like Muslims for special searches, for example, we cannot also forbid people from opposing that policy by claiming, in cartoons or otherwise, that Islam is committed to terrorism, however misguided we think that opinion is. Certainly we should criticize the judgment and taste of such people. But religion must observe the principles of democracy, not the other way around. No religion can be permitted to legislate for everyone about what can or cannot be drawn any more than it can legislate about what may or may not be eaten. No one's religious convictions can be thought to trump the freedom that makes democracy possible.
There was another eloquent piece last week in the New York Times about how freedom of religion and freedom of speech (both part of the First Amendment) are inseparable. In an op-ed article called "Defenders of the Faith," Slavoj Zizek wrote:
[T]he lesson of today's terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including blowing up thousands of innocent bystanders, is permitted — at least to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies the violation of any merely human constraints and considerations. In short, fundamentalists have become no different than the "godless" Stalinist Communists, to whom everything was permitted since they perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of Progress Toward Communism....UPDATE 3/15/06: Acton H. Gorton, the editor of the Daily Illini, the student newspaper at the University of Illinois in Champagne, was fired for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed:
While a true atheist has no need to boost his own stance by provoking believers with blasphemy, he also refuses to reduce the problem of the [Danish newspaper] Muhammad caricatures to one of respect for other's beliefs. Respect for other's beliefs as the highest value can mean only one of two things: either we treat the other in a patronizing way and avoid hurting him in order not to ruin his illusions, or we adopt the relativist stance of multiple "regimes of truth," disqualifying as violent imposition any clear insistence on truth.
What, however, about submitting Islam — together with all other religions — to a respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis? This, and only this, is the way to show a true respect for Muslims: to treat them as serious adults responsible for their beliefs.
"If I can be fired, what will other students think who maybe want to challenge the status quo?" said Gorton, who had briefly addressed a board meeting the previous night. "This is a bad precedent."(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.)
Gorton said he intends to sue the publishers of The Daily Illini, citing, among other complaints, unlawful dismissal....
The paper's opinions page editor, Chuck Prochaska, also was suspended for his role in publishing the cartoons. He declined to be reinstated, the board said.
Prochaska said he and Gorton moved quickly to publish the cartoons because they were newsworthy.
"We had a news story on our hands, with violence erupting about imagery, but you can't show it because of a taboo, because of a taboo that's not a Western taboo but a Muslim taboo?" he said. "That's a blow to journalism."
