Here’s the post that’s already rounded up all the commentary on this latest version of an increasingly tired story, and already been linked to by the Blog of Record (more on Glenn’s own take below):
As Radley Balko noted in yesterday’s Morning Links, the Washington Post and other newspapers pulled Wiley Miller’s syndicated “Non Sequitur” cartoon from their comics pages two Sundays back, because Miller pulled a familiar-to-Reason-readers “where’s Waldo?”gag with the Prophet Muhammad, satirizing the new 21st century taboo on the depiction of even jokes about the fear of depicting a historical figure who really existed. . . .
Advice for my newspaper friends: Listen to Penn Jillette. “[W]e haven’t tackled Islam because we have families,” he says. “[A]nd I think the worst thing you can say about a group in a free society is that you’re afraid to talk about it.” There, that wasn’t very hard, was it?
No, it’s not at all — that’s exactly what I said right here on Dean’s World way back in 2006! I’ll spare you the clicking, the meat of it being here:
Is religiously offensive material different? Only if you’re religious, or very sensitive to religious sensibilities. But the bookstores are packed, overflowing in fact, with books that criticize, abuse and demean religion; if they made that a section of the average Barnes & Noble it would take up the whole downstairs, so they distribute them in other categories!
No, the nub of it here is that the magazine won’t be carried “because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries.” They’re not really covering up or even, I think, suggesting that Muslims were the victims of these riots in any morally meaningful sense.
What they’re saying is, “Sorry. We don’t want riots in our stores, okay? We don’t want our directors kidnapped. We don’t want our employees blown up.” Tim Blair think that makes them contemptible chickens. Glenn Reynolds calls them cowards. You know what? On my Likelihood of Confusion blog, where free speech is one of my thematic topics, I have still not reproduced the cartoons. I have a family, people. I can’t make a stand on this (supposedly) moral point; I’m not dying on this hill; and as a religious person myself, by the way, I’m not necessarily interested in promoting mockery of the founders of religions in the public forum. (But see here.) . . .
I’m open to persuasion on this. I realize this position represents a moral compromise. But my guess is that people who own businesses and homes, who have families and friends in the real and vulnerable world, will recognize that you have to pick your battles. Waldenbooks and Borders are only book stores. I don’t expect the Department of State to be so cautious. But how many armored divisions does Borders have?
Does every mall need to have barbed wire around the food court, checkpoints at the ATM’s and metal detectors at Hot Sam’s, all so we can make fun of the Prophet everywhere, all the time?
To which Glenn Reynolds responds — well, no not to my piece, but to what’s going on — in his post, linked to above, very incisively: ”May you have joy of the incentive structure you’re creating, O guardians of societal values. Because you’re going to be living with it.”
And that is an important distinction. Ron Coleman and his blogs are one thing. Even bookstores are another thing. But “The Fifth Estate”?!
Turns out they’re not quite the “other thing” they would have us believe, I guess.
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