For those who have not followed the brouhaha, Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, is being raked over the coals for his statement to reporters that “Muslims have a right to be angry” about the irreverent manner in which Muhammad was depicted in the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, and that the editor of the magazine “didn’t understand the role he played in his tragic death. . . . Killing in response to insult, no matter how gross, must be unequivocally condemned. That is why what happened in Paris cannot be tolerated. But neither should we tolerate the kind of intolerance that provoked this violent reaction.”
The Washington Post described Donohue’s words as “some of the more offensive and insensitive comments made on this tragic day.” Janet Allon on the website Salon labeled it an “insane right-wing reaction.”
Similar attacks could be heard among others in the media, including the conservative pundits on Fox News. Donahue was charged with not being properly respectful of the freedom of expression, as if he were in some way representative of the same authoritarian mentality that motivated the shooters.
We heard over and over that freedom of expression was an “absolute” right; that every good American had an obligation to approach these issues with the quote (perhaps mistakenly) attributed to Voltaire front and center in their thinking: “I may disagree with what you have to say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.”
When interviewing Donohue on her Fox News program, Megyn Kelly interrupted Donohue abruptly when he attempted to describe the more offensive material from Charlie Hebdo, stating emphatically, “That doesn’t matter.” She argued that the protection of offensive speech is “the bedrock of the First Amendment.” Sean Hannity reacted similarly, observing that there is no room for equivocation about the sacredness of freedom of expression in a free society.
It strikes me that Hannity and Kelly and the other conservatives jumping all over Donohue should be going through a bout of cognitive dissonance — the psychological tension that occurs when one holds mutually exclusive beliefs or attitudes. If I remember correctly, they were up in arms when Andres Serrano’s photo of a crucifix submerged in urine and a painting of the Blessed Mother covered with elephant dung appeared in museums in New York City not that long ago. It is true that they did not call for anyone to be killed over these works, and that their argument centered on the public’s right to protest the public funding provided for their display. But what is so different about that stance and Donohue’s on the shootings in Paris?
Donohue stated clearly in a statement on the Catholic League website, “Nothing justifies the killing of these people. But this is not the whole of this issue. The cartoonists, and all those associated with Charlie Hebdo, are no champions of freedom. Quite the opposite: Their obscene portrayal of religious figures — so shocking that not a single TV station or mainstream newspaper would show them — represents an abuse of freedom.” He described the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists as “pornographers disguised as satirists. We’re not talking about Mel Brooks, we’re talking about functional equivalent of Larry Flynt going to print.”
Is the comparison to Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, an overstatement? Donohue does not think so. On the Catholic League’s website, he wrote:
“Those who work at this newspaper have a long and disgusting record of going way beyond the mere lampooning of public figures, and this is especially true of their depictions of religious figures. For example, they have shown nuns masturbating and Popes wearing condoms. They have also shown Muhammad in pornographic poses. While some Muslims today object to any depiction of the Prophet, others do not. Moreover, visual representations of him are not proscribed by the Koran. What unites Muslims in their anger against Charlie Hebdo is the vulgar manner in which Muhammad has been portrayed. What they object to is being intentionally insulted over the course of many years. On this aspect, I am in total agreement with them.”
Reread Donohue’s words. All he is demanding is freedom of speech: the freedom of speech to criticize the editors of Charlie Hebdo. Also, that our revulsion over the shootings in Paris should not lead to a knee-jerk defense of pornographers to operate freely in society. In the United States we seem to have surrendered to the proposition that we have no legal right to censor obscene material. But that is not the case.
The 1973 case Miller v. California gave us the guidelines: The key questions are (a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the material, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interests, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct, (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, has redeeming social value, or lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. As far as I know, the Miller guidelines have not been overruled; they have been ignored.
I have never seen a copy of Charlie Hebdo (or Hustler for that matter). But, from descriptions of its subject matter, it is difficult to see why it would be so over-the-top to make the case in a public statement that it fits within the guidelines that define obscenity. In fact, Donohue does not even go that far. All he is calling for is a collective societal expression of disapproval of the vulgar content of this French newspaper.
Our Founding Fathers did not see the First Amendment as protection for pornographers. Censorship of obscene material and “blue laws” were part of the fabric of our lives from the time the Constitution was ratified until the final decades of the 20th century.
There are still many Americans alive today who remember when the kind of sexually explicit material that appears in Playboy and Hustler and all over the Internet and cable television could be accessed only in “plain brown wrappers” and “under the counter” in sleazy shops in the “bad section” of town. We are within our rights to protest against those who are using the killings in Paris to push the case for making the publication of pornography a constitutional right.
Then again, maybe this is a fight that does not have to be fought. You will no doubt have noticed: The free thinkers who oppose laws against pornographic material have no objections to laws designed to promote their politically correct agenda. Take a little survey, if you doubt that is the case. I would bet serious money that those who would assure us they will defend to the death the editors of Charlie Hebdo have no problem with shouting down conservative speakers on college campuses, establishing “hate speech” codes on campus, and removing the “Uncle Remus” stories from the local library. There is censorship and there is censorship.
Should Donohue have waited a week or so before speaking out against the assassinated staff at Charlie Hebdo? That can be argued. But not that it is “anti-democratic” to call for restrictions on obscenity in the manner that the United States once did routinely, until the ascendancy of the counterculture in the late 1960s. There is no reason for a commitment to freedom of the press to include pornographers.
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