THE LOS ANGELES TIMES PRIDES ITSELF on being Sensitivity Central in American journalism. Its editor, Shelby Coffey III, created a media frenzy when he championed a new stylebook for the paper that epitomizes political correctness. What, then, explains the paper’s decision to pull three “B. C.” comic strips around Eastertime because of their religious content?
The strips themselves were mild. Anybody who found them overly religious would suffer seizures in a museum of Renaissance art. The strongest content came in a Palm Sunday strip which contained a poem called “The Suffering Prince,” with the words:
Picture yourself in raiment white, Cleansed by the blood of the lifelong Knight, Never to mourn the Prince who was downed, For He is not lost: It is you who are found.
Religious-conservative groups such as the Christian Coalition that are making hay out of the spiking of “B. C.” cite it as evidence of anti- Christian bigotry. That’s overstating things. In fact, it’s the sensitivity and diversity movement itself that explains the paper’s decision not to run the strips. Mike Lang, a spokesman for the paper, says the strips are ” insensitive and exclusionary.” According to this understanding of diversity, in order to be sensitive to other faiths, everybody has to shut up about his own. It’s fine to pray in your own church, but anybody who brings religious sentiments into the public square is deemed to be proselytizing. That’s automatically offensive. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
As usual, the effort to enhance diversity merely creates uniformity. Instead of living in a world of complicatedand diverse religious sentiments, in the name of diversity the Times helps construct a public square that is monolithically secular.
On April 6, the Times ran its own story on the “B. C.” controversy. The Times had decided to print the spiked cartoons on the religion page not because the paper changed its mind, the story said, but because they had become newsworthy. There’s an interesting contrast of tone here. The paper explained itself by using the ponderous, clich-ridden rhetoric of the diversity movement: “We are mindful that The Times is a secular publication serving a large and quite diverse and pluralistic community,” the story quoted associate editor Narda Zacchino as saying. “While we respect affirmations of personal religious faith, we are also aware that aggressively urging such affrmation on others who have not sought them all may be considered proselytizing and inappropriate for the comics page.”
After that pomposity, “B. C.” creator Johnny Hart is straightforward and modest. He lives in upstate New York and has been drawing “B. C.” since 1958 (he also does “The Wizard of Id”). The vast majority of the “gags,” as he calls the strips, are secular, but on certain holidays he likes to introduce a religious element. “I believe mine is the right faith, and I wish others would come over to it for true salvation, but I don’t think I’m offending anyone. Other religions don’t offend me.”
Though this is not the first time the L.A. Times has spiked his strip, Hart is mystified by the controversy and speaks with the simplicity of one who has missed the recent change of etiquette. “I was shocked when people would write to tell me that I’m being brave. They write to say, ‘How do you get away with it?'” The whole episode reminds us how oversensitive America has become, and how in the name of diversity, we’ve stripped religion from the public square.
God isn’t dead; we just don’t let Him out much anymore.
by David Brooks
