Cartoons illustrate issues of truth

Newspapers should “refrain from publishing offensive caricatures of Muhammad in the name of the ultimate Enlightenment value: tolerance.” So says the Boston Globe.

I have to ask, if in the place of “Muhammad,” I put the name Jesus, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Joseph Smith, Zarathustra, or, let’s say, L. Ron Hubbard, would the Globe see that as equally enlightened?

I don’t think so. But for a moment, let’s say they do.

If, in the name of tolerance, newspapers must cease publishing caricatures of religious figures, what do we do with such things that appear in museums, books, films, stage and television productions, personal correspondence, conversations, websites, blogs, textiles or doodled on napkins and envelopes?

Last week in the Orange County Register, a letter from Ranga Nathan, a Hindu, recalled how sandals bearing images of Hindu deities had offended him and others of the faith. Along with a number of Hindu organizations, he wrote to the San Francisco-based distributor asking it to take the shoes off the market.

The company declined, standing by its constitutional right to freedom of expression. Nathan saw their interest as one of greed, not free speech. But he and other Hindus were, all the same, left to live with the offense.

In January, when Vanessa Au, a graduate student at San Francisco State University, wrote to Spencer’s Gifts to complain about three T-shirts she and a friend found insulting, no one from the company bothered to write her back.

One shirt sported a drawing of Buddha circled by the caption, “I may be fat. But my [you can fill in the blank] is huge!” Spencer’s has built an empire selling such tacky ? and often highly offensive ? kitsch. If you can’t fill in the blank, you can get the details about all three shirts from Vanessa’s blog, www.vanessaau.com.

Had Nathan and Au taken to the streets, killed a few folks and torched a building or two, all they would have gotten was a criminal record and a world of grief. But 132 deaths later, those protesting the publication of a dozen caricatures of Muhammad have the world’s patient attention and many apologists.

Regarding the deadly clamor over the cartoons drawn by Danish artists, some have characterized the issue as one of religious blasphemy. Others, especially here in the United States, have framed it more as an issue of religious sensitivity versus freedom of speech.

In the minds of some, if one or the other has got to go, it’s got to be religious sensitivity. As Andrew Sullivan wrote in Time magazine, “If violating a taboo is necessary to illustrate a political point, then the call is an easy one. Freedom means learning to deal with being offended.”

We may be what New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has called a nation “more infused with religion than the rest of the world.” But our secular and religious citizens are becoming increasingly polarized on issues involving education, science and ethics.

As Kristof has noted, the intellectual traditions of Christianity withered during the course of the last century, “leaving the scholarly and religious worlds increasingly antagonistic.” Believe what you like, but in the university, in the public square, on the op-ed page, in Hollywood and on Comedy Central, don’t expect religion to be taken seriously.

We seem to live in an age when nothing is sacred save for the freedom of speech, which makes it all the more difficult for us to understand what followed ? albeit not immediately ? the publication of a handful of editorial cartoons that broke a religious taboo.

As with Peter Beinart, who wrote for the New Republic about the riots in reaction to the Muhammad cartoons, my first response was horror. “Responding to the thuggishness is easy,” Beinart wrote. “Responding to the cartoons themselves is harder. It is hard to condemn them when the barbaric response in parts of the Islamic world so vastly dwarfs the initial offense.”

At the end of that sentence I thought, “Amen.” But at the end of the next ? “And yet, the cartoons should be condemned nonetheless” ? a second “amen” didn’t come as easily.

Beinart believes the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten had the right to print the cartoons. But because, in his view, the cartoons “revealed a particularly European prejudice” stemming from Europe’s “inability to take religion seriously at all,” he also believes the newspaper should not have published them.

In his article for Time, Beinart quoted the culture editor of the Jyllands-Posten defending his decision to print the cartoons: “This is about the question of integration and how compatible is the religion of Islam with a modern secular society.” It’s an issue we are contending with far more than Beinart imagines. But the question here is not about Islam in particular; it’s about whether any religion can be compatible with a postmodern society. Secularists, many of whom, like the Enlightened ones in the 18th century, associate religion only with ignorance, superstition and tyranny ? thereby seeing it as the root of all evil ? aren’t inclined to think so.

Beinart still sees this country as one “where the right to be openly religious is considered precious” ? unlike France, where a Muslim girl wearing a head scarf to school can be expelled, or Denmark, where “employers can fire Muslim women for doing the same.”

Yet being openly religious is about far more than that; it means having a place at the table of public discourse. If you can’t reasonably expect your view of God and man to come in some way to bear on the mores of the society in which you live, what good is a head scarf, a crucifix or a beard?

A few nights into the so-called cartoon wars, Comedy Central’s spoof senior news correspondent Stephen Colbert began “The Colbert Report” like this: “How many roads must a man walk down before he’s run over by an 18-wheeler of truth?”

Then he segued, “I did not show the cartoons out of an ethical concern that I might be killed” ? which is more than many real news organizations have cared to admit.

If this is all about tolerance and sensitivity, let’s see the same concessions made for the adherents of other faiths the next time they are insulted.

Respect. Tolerance. Understanding. None of these are the fruits of intimidation or fear. If we’re running from the truth, we may as well stop because we’re kidding ourselves if we believe we can outrun an 18-wheeler.