Cartoons of the Prophet

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

In the winter of 1874, some young Lakota boys living in a camp around Ft. Robinson, Nebraska, thought it was great fun to climb a flagpole, chop the tip off, incidentally bringing the United States flag flying from it down into the dust. Trigger happy soldiers were about to gun down every Lakota in sight, male or female, child or adult. Chief Red Cloud, who had fought the U.S. army to a standstill in 1868, then accepted reservation life while Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were still fighting to remain free, addressed the soldiers eloquently. He said that the boys must of course be punished, but grown men do not gun down entire communities over the pranks of children. He asked the soldiers if they had ever done foolish things when they were boys.

The Danish publisher who commissioned cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohammed was not a boy, nor were the cartoonists who responded. The assignment, and the cartoons themselves, are indeed childish. There is no legal authority to punish them, nor should there be any. The entire episode evidences a failure to communicate.

Many of those protesting the cartoons live in nations where publications are closely regulated by the government. In some nations, there may be only one television network, and that one is an organ of the state. Newspapers are subject by law to prior censorship, or to criminal penalties for printing material the government deems inappropriate. (The popularity of Al-Jazeera satellite broadcasts is not so much that they attack the west, as that they are independent of government control in the Middle East.) In most of these nations, blasphemy, at least against the dominant religion, is a well-know criminal offense. Generally, violent protests have occured in nations where Islam is the dominant religion.

That should not be such a foreign concept to Europeans, or even to Americans. Every nation in Europe at one time had a tightly controlled press, and most British colonies in North America had one also. Most European nations had, and still have, an established church. It is a pale shadow of its former self, but tax money is still paid to support the mostly empty churches of Europe's state-favored religious sects.

It is no more than a century since most European nations had laws punishing blasphemy against some or all Christian doctrines. (Cartoons lampooning the Pope were acceptable in Protestant nations, but not in Catholic nations). Most of the original 13 colonies also imposed criminal penalties for at least some forms of blasphemy. The Roman Catholic Church sometimes seems intent on restoring that kind of influence over the secular law if it possibly can. But John Calvin and Martin Luther were equally guilty in their own times. So was Cotton Mather.

Why are these cartoons deemed to be blasphemous by Muslims?

Has anyone noticed recently that the Ten Commandments (which are part of the Qu'ran as well as the Torah and the Bible) prohibit making "any graven image of anything that is in the heavens above or the earth beneath or the waters under the earth"? Islam takes that very, very literally. Muslim art features beautiful and intricate abstract designs, because it simply does not allow for any images at all.

Most Christians understand this prohibition in light of the following phrase "you shall not bow down to them or serve them." As long as we do not worship the graven image, we don't see a problem with realistic painting and sculpture. But it is not a foreign concept to Christians that a passage from Scripture "means what it says and it says what it means." Some Christians refuse to pledge allegiance to a flag, because we will not bow down to a graven image.

Islam particularly prohibits any image of the Prophet, unlike Christianity, which freely produces a variety of images portraying Jesus. Usually these images have nothing in common with what the human body of Jesus actually looked like when he walked on earth. Most paintings of Jesus (there are no photographs) simply try to make the man culturally relevant to whatever population is currently being evangelized. That is how bronze-skinned missionaries from the Mediterranean came to portray Jesus with pink skin and blonde hair, to the pale barbarians of northern Europe.

We all know the song "I don't care if it rains or freezes, long as I got my plastic Jesus, riding on the dashboard of my car..." There are no Plastic Prophets for the faithful of Islam. Muslims simply don't allow the making of any image at all. It is considered a special mark of disrespect to depict God's final prophet, who was taken up by God directly to heaven, somewhat like Enoch in Genesis 5:24. But originally, the prohibition recognized that Mohammed is not God, that no graven image is to be made of him.

So devout followers of Islam, living in nations with a tightly controlled press, where blasphemy is a criminal offense, may be making some natural assumptions about the meaning of these contemptible cartoons. It would be natural to assume that such cartoons had to be approved by the Danish government in order to be printed. It would be natural to assume that the Danish government is maliciously refraining from prosecution of this blasphemy. It would be natural to take that as a deliberate insult to Islam.

The cartoons are an insult to Islam. But insulting a religion (any religion) is not a crime in the United States, nor at this time in Denmark. It is not a crime any more in most of Europe. Saddam Hussein could decree any law he wanted, any time he wanted, including an ex post facto, law making a crime of something already done. The president of Denmark has no such power. Nor is it lawful to assassinate the author of such blasphemies, merely because someone's beliefs have been insulted.

Blasphemy against Christians is also legal here

Christian have to put up with this all the time in the United States. A good example is Terrence McNally's blasphemous play, Corpus Christi, which depicts Jesus Christ and the 12 Apostles as gay men engaged in group sex. There was a lawsuit about that in federal court a few years ago. Linnemeir v. Board of Trustees of Purdue University The result: the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals found that the play "is indeed blasphemous," but there is no legal basis to prohibit a theater major producing it, even at a state-funded university. Christians have a right to denounce the play, to picket the play, to boycott the play, and encourage others to do so. But there is no legal basis to suppress the play, nor to punish the author, producer, or actors who participate in presenting it.

That is difficult for many Muslims, in nations with a controlled press, to understand. If the government does not authorize the cartoons, if the government lacks authority to suppress the cartoons, then the government is not responsible for the content of the cartoons. Nor are the individual or corporate citizens of the nation in which the cartoons are published. Only the individuals who wrote them, and choose to publish them, are responsible for the content.

In some nations, blasphemy may be subject to a penalty of death, lawfully adopted and published in the legal codes. Danish cartoonists should be aware of these laws before travelling to such nations. Denmark has no such laws, nor does the United States. It is unacceptable that anyone should take the law into their own hands in a nation where no such legal penalty exists. But before we get too high up on our liberal horses, we should again remember our own history. There was no law against publishing abolitionist newspapers in Illinois before the Civil War either. That did not stop a pro-slavery mob from burning down the print-shop of Elijah Lovejoy, dumping his press in the river, and, when he attempted to defend his property, shooting him dead.

In parts of the world where Islam is the dominant faith, it is well known that after the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, mobs in the United States attempted to deface or destroy a few mosques. (There were also Christian and Jewish neighbors who came to the defense of such mosques – just as Muslim neighbors volunteered to defend Christian churches in Indonesia during the 2005 Christmas season). The members of at least some of those American mosques were fifth-generation Americans, whose ancestors came to these shores before the collapse of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. There was also one incident where some thugs who mistook a Sikh gas station owner in Arizona for a Muslim, murdered him as an act of "revenge" for the World Trade Center.

Essential principles to work our way out of this mess:

1. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are non-negotiable. Al-Jazeera would no doubt be the first to agree.
2. Juvenile cretins, who take pleasure in casual blasphemies to get a rise out of believers, are not worthy of support or respect, albeit they have the legal right to make public idiots of themselves.
3. Individuals are responsible for their own actions, and to some extent for the actions of organizations to which they freely commit themselves and which they freely consent to or support. There can be no guilt by association of all Americans for the act of one or 100 Americans, all Muslims for the act of one or 100 Muslims, all Danes for the act of one or 100 Danes.
4. None of us can claim a history of perfectly clean hands, but it is worth fighting to hold onto the hard-won progress we have made.
5. Those who seek God through the path of Islam would do well to break the habit of relying on the state to enforce religious laws, a habit that most Christians reluctantly abandoned in the last 200 years or so.
6. Christians trying to restore the habit of relying on the state to enforce religious laws should be careful what they wish for.
7. and God (Yaweh, Adonai, al-Lah – The God) help us every one.

Burke Was Wrong

Birkenstocks – on the left foot or the right foot – can't save America

There are many mansions in the American conservative house, and some of them are old and funky and smell like a pot of organic mustard greens cooking down on the stove.

So says Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, a book about counter-cultural conservatives. Dreher's book has been promoted in the New York Times Book Review – which must not be such an exclusively liberal forum as many have come to believe. The reviewer, David D. Kilpatrick, is a Washington correspondent for The Times. At first glance, I thought he was listed as a correspondent for The Washington Times, which would be conservatism cubed. (Does Sun Myung Moon still own that paper, or did his "church" merely finance the start-up and spin off the "alternative" paper on its merry way?

It is always good to see stereotypes topple like overturned idols. It is too bad when another collection of disconnected beliefs is raised on the same pedestal, for all to admire as a contender to be the New Dominant Paradigm.

I can find some points of agreement with Dreher. There are other points where we are poles apart. This gives Dreher something in common with almost every other person I have ever met or heard of. Are there any two Americans who can be grouped under one label, and agree on everything?

I have no problem with the concept of "right-wing hippies." I always thought a lot of the hippies were self-centered exhibitionists who would grow up to be ruthless tycoons. The individual self-preoccupation of the early Reagan era was driven by the spending power of hippies over 30. Outbreaks of whooping cough have appeared wherever a pocker of hippie mamas were too anti-social to get their babies vaccinated. (And where was the right-to-life movement, when these born children were facing painful deaths by parental neglect?)

But I digress. I go along with Dreher on preserving the environment, resisting television, refusing to buy some gadget that big business and the dominant culture says I must have. I'm all for sustainable development. I even like being able to rely on some traditional mores. I really don't admire bed-hopping, pornography, or seeing near-pornography on billboards.

Abortion rights? That doesn't get me excited. I'm an old-fashioned conservative who believes that one of the most important rights in our Constitution is the right to be left alone. (See the eloquent dissents of Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes in Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438. I'm happy to see nosy state authorities ordered to leave women alone in their first trimester of pregnancy, and to some extent even in the second. I'm happy to see committed right-to-life organizations reach out to pregnant women, offering moral perspective and material support.

Same-sex mariage... that's an oxymoron. The Massachusetts Supreme Court made an obvious error, then adhered to it with very consistent logic. "Equal protection of the laws" has not been infringed by any state's definition of marriage. Every man has an equal right to a license to marry a woman, and vice versa. The possibility that either the man, or the woman, entering into a marriage, may be a homosexual, has never been raised as an impediment. But constitutional amendments are not necessary to substantiate the obvious. Do we need constitutional amendments to affirm that the sky is blue?

I'm firmly committed to public schools. I'm not on Dreher's page at all there. One of the great strengths of our nation has been that sooner or later, most of our children have to meet and mix with each other. They don't have to abandon their own morals, they just have to learn that people with different beliefs exist, and are not aliens. Men used to experience that in the armed forces, when we had a draft, and definitely during World War II. It was one of our nation's hidden strengths in the post-war years.

Nobody has ever been able to tell me what a "secular liberal" is, so I won't take a position on them. It would be like criticizing the yeti, or the bogeyman. Most liberals I know go to church. Most really secular people I know are navel-contemplating egotists, who probably vote Republican a good part of the time.

I guess I'm a little too libertarian for Rod Dreher. But if he doesn't like Wal-Mart, or McMansions, or agribusiness, here is a neolibertarian position he might want to consider:

There is no more appropriate use of government authority than breaking up private concentrations of power that infringe on the liberties of individual citizens. By citizens, I mean live flesh and blood people, not soul-less corporations. I am all for massive regulation of big business, restrained oversight of medium size business... and leave the small proprietors alone, as long as they don't dump their garbage on their neighbors, sell meat contaminated with salmonella, or cheat their employees, if any.

What really keeps the United States of America strong is that there is no single majority which defines how we as a people feel about all issues of concern. Pick any political controversy: how a majority and minority line up on that question will be different than who is in what majority or minority on ANY other subject. Most majorities can't even agree among themselves about WHY they favor whatever it is they believe in. That is why we have avoided civil wars for over 150 years.

Do Republicans Eat Oreos?

Color Blind Does Not Mean Clueless

One of the results of the civil rights movement is that Americans of African descent are now much more free to be conservative if they wish to. Fifty years ago, all the best clubs, best neighborhoods, highest circles of business and commerce, made a point of excluding people with darker complexions. Therefore, people born with a high epidermal melanin concentration had little choice but to associate with whatever liberal, radical, socialist or communist circles would accept them and fight for them – sometimes with ulterior motives, sometimes not.

Before 1932, most African Americans who could vote at all voted Republican, the party that proposed and ratified the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the federal constitution. Since 1932, most vote Democratic, the party of the New Deal. After 1948, democrats belatedly made civil rights an important plank of their platform.

The Republican Party cheerfully abandoned its last ties to significant African American support in the 1970s, welcoming with open arms the overt and covert racists of all regions, who no longer felt at home in the Democratic Party. The party of Kennedy, Johnson and Carter had come a long way from its 1868 campaign slogan "This is a White Man's country, let White Men rule."

One can understand why the "yellow dog" Democrats felt betrayed, so betrayed they were willing to become Republicans. For their part, Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes have shown no sign of returning to their own party's 1868 platform. That was pretty well abandoned in 1876, when the "Liberal Republicans" took over the party from the "Radical Republicans"!

At the dawn of the 21st century, republican strategists decided they wanted the White Conservative Vote and the Black Vote. The clever ploy to achieve this objective, of course, is to run conservative black republican candidates for office. Pity the Conservative Black Republican! Their party is counting on them to swing The Black Vote from the democrats, but liberal-minded African Americans pelt them with oreos. Despite the strenuous rhetoric of many African American pastors, even the God-fearing, church-going brothers and sisters continue to regard Republicans the way their great-great-grandparents regarded southern Democrats. It was the father of a Republican congressman from Oklahoma who remarked "black folks voting for Republicans is like chickens voting for Col. Sanders."

"Just pretending racism doesn't exist doesn't mean it isn't there." With this clumsy but obvious statement, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist Salena Zito launched a moderately impassioned advocacy for Lynn Swann, a conservative republican retired football star with a dark complexion, who is running to be the next governor of Pennsylvania. Of course it is ridiculous for anyone to suggest that skin color requires any person to have any set of political beliefs or allegiances. Not only is Oprah free to become an influential TV personality and a millionaire, but Condoleeza Rice is free to be a close associate of George W. Bush.

This does not make Rice any more "black" or less "black" than she was born with. Her skin color is irrelevant. She is, however, entitled to no breaks for being "black." She is an adherent of the most juvenile, clueless, incompetent president we have ever had, a man who will rank with Millard Fillmore and James Polk in the history books. With the departure of Colin Powell, she is unquestionably the most intelligent person in the cabinet. That is a function of her brain, education, life experiences, and self-discipline, not her color. One can only speculate why she chooses to serve a president raised by the Peter Principle (and Karl Rove) to such a high level of incompetence.

Conservative Republicans complain that THEIR "black" candidates are being subjected to abuse for not following some "politically correct" racial stereotype. That is a valid point, but they invite, sometimes even deserve, this kind of misguided abuse. Republicans, continuing to identify themselves with the archaic labels "black" and "white," are in their own way playing their own race card. The Republican Party wants to have its racist cake, and eat the Democratic cake too, while calling critics of its African American candidates racist.

Michael Steele's candidacy for senator from Maryland was greeted by a crowd throwing oreo cookies? Well, maybe. A fact checker called RegretTheError suggests not. It is unfortunate that many people, who identify with the label African American, make an implied demand for conformity from "anyone who looks like us." But Steele courted that kind of rejection by running as a BLACK Republican.

Steele is lieutenant governor of Maryland today, because Gov. Bob Ehrlich thought a black face on the ticket would enhance Ehrlich's chances of getting elected in the first place. If Steele said, yes, I am a republican, I am a conservative, my skin color has nothing to do with it, I have no stereotype to conform to, take me as I am, vote for me if you believe what I believe, that would be fine.

But Steele's candidacy IS an attempt to "pull the black vote" – perpetuating the myth that "black voters" are a bloc that goes for "one of our own." Do republicans with dark skin colors have such a low opinion of the intelligence of African American voters? How about the mostly "white" Republican campaign strategists?

What is wrong with Steele is not that he is "black on the outside, white on the inside." There is NO "black" way of thinking, acting, or choosing. The whole point of the civil rights movement was that each individual should be free to make their own choices for their own lives, exert their own efforts, and advance according to their own merit. Steele's problem is that he thinks his skin color will make "conservatives" of people who don't really support his philosophy. So, some of them respond to the insult by passing oreos around at his campaign rallies. (Not, apparently, by pelting him with anything).

A Pennsylvania republican named Otto Banks complains that "An African-American Republican running for office can expect to be pictured incessantly with President Bush, linked with the NRA and gun proliferation ... labeled a sellout and compared to Strom Thurman." Well, why not? Those are the associates any republican has chosen. Why would an African American join the party where Strom Thurmond found a refuge after his Dixiecrat campaign for the white house?

The overwhelming majority of African American voters hold the current federal leadership in contempt, as do somewhere around half to two-thirds of the total population of the United States. ANY Republican who does not unambiguously repudiate the Bush administration should expect to be held accountable for the company they keep. Their race is no reason to give them any breaks on that account. As my Republican mother says, George W. Bush has done a great deal of damage to this country.

Most of us human beings are pretty complex in our actual principles and viewpoints. We defy sorting out into neat little categories. We are all conservative about some things, liberal about others. We all have some values that are very important to us, others less so. There are conservative republican homosexuals and there are liberal democrats who have been faithful to their wives/husbands all their life. Some African Americans are very hostile to homosexuality, but the same percentage of African Americans are attracted to their own gender as any other demographic category. There have always been a handful of conservative black republicans. Sammy Davis Jr. and Jackie Robinson were both known for endorsing Richard M. Nixon.

Everybody adores the civil rights movement with 20/20 hindsight, but it was far from adored when it represented a sharp break in American habits and culture. There were a fair number of "black" people who PREFERRED segregated schools, where they could in a limited way run their own show and be sure their own students would be on the football team and be valedictorian. There were, obviously, millions of "white" people who resisted the movement with extreme hatred and violence. They had to be suppressed, pushed aside, put down... they had to be overcome, in various ways.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. definitely would not have countenanced the kind of stereotypes that the aging generation of post-civil-rights leaders continue to push. But he was not the fuzzy soft apostle of love that those in public office today like to recall. He took unpopular stands because he saw it was the right thing to do. He demanded that America pay attention to pulling those left in poverty out of it – not with endless welfare, not with the delusions of "empowerment" while denying access to real capital, but with genuine access and opportunity. There were plenty of "black conservatives" in his own day, and they were among his harshest critics. He led a walkout from the National Baptist Convention for that very reason. Martin Luther King defied the law several times, openly and honestly, went to jail for it proudly. Black conservatives said that was where he belonged.

Zito concludes on a fine note: "If you have problems with candidates, attack their principles or their ideas, not the color of their skin." I would only add, if you think you have something to offer as a candidate, rest your case on your principles and your ideas, not on parading the color of your skin and hoping a good number of voters will go your way because of it, no matter what your principles.