Skip to main content

Dear Jessica, THIS is protected speech: Get over it

Waldo brought my attention to this one, although I disagree strongly with his sweeping generalization in the opening line:

Christians are innovative when it comes to ducking responsibility for their bigotries.


This is the poster placed all over campus on an Ohio community college by an atheist group promoting its next meeting:



It brought out the predictable narrow-minded rejoinders that the people behind the poster were mocking religion:

Student aide Jessica Hodge said she felt the poster would “pollute the minds” of her children, ages 2 and 5, if they saw it.

“It looks like soft-core pornography,” she said. “I don’t think they’re making a statement at all. They just want to shock everyone.”

A Christian, Hodge said she doesn’t try to force her opinions on others. Questioning religion is fine, but mocking it isn’t, she said.


As another Christian who believes in the First Amendment, Jessica, I need to explain to you that mocking religion is perfectly fair game. And I'd also point out that at ages 2 and 5, if they're normal, your children will be incapable of seeing a sexual message in this picture because they are developmentally incapable of doing so. But even if they were, who gave you the right to have the world re-ordered to fit your particular child-raising practices.

This is also protected speech:



If you don't recognize it, it's Andres Serrano's Piss Christ.

The image below, also, by Dutch artist Theo Van Gogh, even though it resulted in a fatwah calling for his death:



Tasteless as you may find his poster, Chris Weaver of the atheist group is exactly right: most Christians have never heard of the Secret Gospel of Mark, nor considered its implications for Christian theology or the history of the early Church. Sure, possibly it is an invention and not a real scrap of the Gospel of Mark--but if Clement of Alexandria believed it was real, that says something that heterosexual only Christians would find exceedingly . . . uncomfortable.

Moreover, Jessica, as John Boswell's Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe argues, the modern construct of homosexuality and Christianity as somehow incompatible is just that--a modern construct not consistent with a long Church history of welcoming all sorts of people.

Contrary to your need to make the world simple and sterile for your children, American society has a need for vigorous consideration of ALL ideas, even in provocative terms. Even in mocking terms.

Christianity can stand it.

The question is whether or not some Christians can.

Comments

Piss Christ may be free speech, but I would prefer not to pay for it with a $15,000 prize from the National Endowment for the Arts. Once I know I'm not paying for it, sure I'll get over it real quick.
Anonymous said…
In Jessica's defense, I would not want to have to raise children in today's religious climate, but maybe that's just because I'm old.

"a long Church history of welcoming all sorts of people"

I think you only have half the message in this statement. Rather than condemning the woman caught in adultery, Jesus condemned those who were condemning her. But He also told her to sin no more. Sorry, His words carry a lot more weight than Clement's.

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?