Such a Sweet Change of Heart…

      It looks as if the American media have had a big change of heart, almost a religious conversion of sorts.  Nearly unanimously the news media have foresworn printing and showing the offensive cartoon depictions of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, depictions which have set off a firestorm of protest and violence in the Muslim world.  The Boston Globe was in the forefront of this new approach to religious issues when its editors announced that they were concerned about peoples’ religious sensibilities and therefore would not publish the caricatures of Mohammed.  Strange, this, coming from a newspaper that just a few years ago fervently defended the exhibition in a New York museum of Chris Ofili’s painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung, the production and exhibition of which was partially funded by your tax dollars. 

      One has to wonder, really ponder this about-face for at least three seconds or so, before one realizes that perhaps the editors of the Boston Phoenix were speaking a bit more truthfully when they said that their decision not to publish the cartoons was 

‘out of fear of retaliation from the international brotherhood of radical and bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do. This is, frankly, our primary reason for not publishing any of the images in question. Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and as deeply as we believe in the principles of free speech and a free press, we could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy’ (from the LA Times, “Let’s be honest about cartoons,” February 11, 2006).   

Well, maybe the Phoenix editors are just the exception; maybe the great media outlets in this country really do want to be careful about religious sensibilities as they have, many of them, so stridently claimed. 

      Tim Rutten, writing for the Los Angeles Times, offers the American media a thoughtful challenge and test case:  what will they all have to say about Sony Pictures’ soon release of The Da Vinci Code, the film based on Dan Brown’s best seller by the same name?   

If the Danish cartoons are, in fact, being withheld from most American newspaper readers and television viewers out of restraint born of a newfound respect for people's religious sensitivities, a great opportunity to prove the point is coming. A major American studio, Sony, shortly will release a film version of Dan Brown's bestselling novel "The Da Vinci Code." It's fair to say that you'd have to go back to the halcyon days of the Nativist publishing operations in the 19th century to find a popular book quite as blatantly and vulgarly anti-Catholic as this one. 

Its plot is a vicious little stew of bad history, fanciful theology and various slanders directed at the Vatican and Opus Dei, an organization to which thousands of Catholic people around the world belong. In this vile fantasy, the Catholic hierarchy is corrupt and manipulative and Opus Dei is a violent, murderous cult. The late Pope John Paul II is accused of subverting the canonization process by pushing sainthood for Josemaría Escrivá, Opus' founder, as a payoff for the organization's purported "rescue" of the Vatican bank. The plot's principal villain is a masochistic albino Opus Dei "monk" for whom murder is just one of many sadistic crimes. (It probably won't do any good to point out that, while it's unclear whether Opus Dei has any albino members, there definitely are no monks)…. More to the point, should newspapers and television networks refuse to accept advertising for this film since plainly that would be promoting hate speech? Will our editors and executives declare their revulsion at the very thought of profiting from bigotry? 

Like myself, Rutten thinks not.  And he tells us why: 

It won't happen for a simple reason that has nothing to do with the ideas being expressed or anybody's sensitivities, religious or otherwise. It won't happen because Pope Benedict XVI isn't about to issue a fatwa against director Ron Howard or star Tom Hanks. It won't happen because Cardinal Roger M. Mahony isn't going to lead an angry mob to burn Sony Studios, and none of the priests of the archdiocese is going to climb into the pulpit Sunday and call for the producer's beheading (from the LA Times, “Let’s be honest about cartoons,” February 11, 2006). 

      In other words, the American media are afraid, and perhaps wisely so, but they should at least have the decency to say so, instead of piously blathering about their concern for peoples’ religious sensibilities.  There is something worse than a coward, and that’s a cowardly hypocrite.  Wait and see, soon the Boston Globe along with the general media will be raving about The Da Vinci Code and pushing for “freedom of speech” when it comes to “art” that blasphemes the holy things of Christians – their idea of “freedom of speech,” that is, that entails using public money to subsidize their pseudo-intellectual disdain for Christianity.  Such fair weather warriors, so very brave!

      Meanwhile, whatever one thinks about the appropriateness of printing things offensive to religious believers, there has been a blow to real freedom of speech and expression:  media editors, pundits, anchormen – nearly the whole lot of them – have imposed censorship on themselves, not for the sake of truth or out of principle, but out of fear.  When the threat of violence is what determines what goes to print or not, then a victory has been won for those who would control by threat, who would destroy a basic freedom in our society – with the help and succor of our so very courageous media.