Dark Brightness

Today is Pentecost. So why am I going back into the muck of the Draw Muhammad competition? It is because I believe that the cause of the gospel — the cause of the right — is promoted by free speech. And free speech is being regulated. I support the day more for the need to push back, than for the simple drawings Ann would hate. From Reason…

The essential backdrop for Everybody Draw Mohammed Day is not the hideous and irredeemable thug’s veto of expression, but a much larger, systemic problem that stretches far beyond questions of whether Mohammed can or should be depicted with a bomb in his turban.

Forget the hundreds of millions of Pakistanis whose government cut off access to Facebook and YouTube in order to spare its citizens the terrifying possiblity of seeing something that might offend them. Turn closer to home, to these United States. As those of us who remember the run-up to the invasion of Iraq or who still expose themselves to the obscenity of Sunday morning talk shows could tell you, our media culture has lost its nerve in the face of any threat of real and imagined disapproval from virtually any source of authority. The same outlets that were quick to cozy up to power and act as its handmaiden when it seemed propititious are similarly quick to shroud themselves in a fog of weasel words about sensitivity and prudence when it comes time to take a stand against any sort of threat.

In Europe, governments in Great Britain and The Netherlands – countries that historically articulated the rights of dissent and conscience – now fine and imprison those who offend with words while making excuses for those who attack with metal. Spain fined cartoonists not for depicting Mohammed but for picturing the country’s crown prince having intercourse with his wife. Canadian bureaucrats, not Canadian Muslims, hauled the publisher of the Western Standard into court for insensitive speech. It is no small detail that one of the first acts of the imams outraged by Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons was not to rebut what they took to be sacrilege but to have Muslim-majority countries petition the Danish government to apply its own hate speech laws. The Danish government responded by pleading that while its hands were tied in terms of directly controlling the press, aggreived parties should seek legal remedies provided under the country’s progressive law: “Danish legislation prohibits acts or expressions of blasphemous or discriminatory nature. The offended party may bring such acts or expressions to court, and it is for the courts to decide in individual cases.”

Anyone who has even flown over an American university in the past 20 years (or has read random issues of Reason over the same time frame) understands the doublespeak that courses through concepts such as multiculturalism and diversity. Rules governing every aspect of campus interaction and discourse exist not to promote or protect speech but to restrict and regulate it. At the national and state levels, legislators pass increasingly arcane laws governing specifically political speech. Regulators and the interests that control them wrestle for expanded control of the Internet’s pipes and for extending content regulation to every transmitting device more powerful than a garage-door opener. Obscenity – impossible to define and hence impossible to defend – remains a cause for imprisoning peaceful men for life. Even as we live in an age of expression that was unimaginable only a few decades ago, we see on every level increasing attempts by governments, corporations, legal and educational institutions, and much more to shut down the relatively free, unfettered rights of expression that we are right to wear like a merit badge. It was only a few decades ago that terrifying works such as Lady Chatterley’;s Lover, Lolita, Naked Lunch, and Howl could be freely published in America. For all our mythologizing about the First Amendment, which guarantees rights not only to speech but religious freedom and assembly, it is not simply a rare bird but an always endangered one too.

Which is to say that Draw Mohammed day is a sign of pushback, not by the groups you would expect to be at the forefront – the organized press and the elected guardians of the Constitution – but by a sea of individuals who will not stand by silently while forces of both hostility and accomodation collude in narrowing the space for acceptable speech.

via And The Winner of The Everybody Draw Mohammad Contest is… – Reason Magazine.