The Philadelphia Inquirer has a smart op-ed about the Garland attack by former federal prosecutor George Parry. He points out the left’s agonized reaction to Garland—We’re for free speech! But these people using free speech are horrible and hateful!
In 1996, another avant-garde artist, Chris Ofili, smeared elephant dung on a portrait of the Blessed Mother and displayed it in a government-funded Brooklyn museum.
And so the stage was set for the ensuing nightmare of Christian terror and violence that descended on the American art community.
Just kidding. Nothing of the sort happened. There were no canonical death warrants issued and no attempts on the lives of the artists or anyone else associated with these presentations.
To be sure, Christians objected to “Piss Christ” and the feces-covered Holy Virgin. And they rightfully wondered why their tax dollars had been used to promote these blasphemies. But their objections and questions were condescendingly dismissed by the secular left in the media and intelligentsia. As one prominent art critic sniffed, Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” was “deliberately provocative” in order to “jolt viewers into an expanded frame of reference, and perhaps even toward illumination.”
As if in one voice, the mainstream media and self-anointed intelligentsia argued that antiquated religious sensitivities must not be allowed to interfere with either an artist’s free expression or his right to government funding regardless of how offensive his work may be to Christians.
But of course it hasn’t been like that this time around. Here’s Parry again:
For the mainstream media and chattering classes, dumping on peaceful, law-abiding Christians is good, safe sport. But pointing the finger of blame at murderous Muslim fanatics? Well, let’s not get carried away. Rather than draw the ire of radical Muslims by firmly and unequivocally condemning the attack, the infotainment industry has concentrated its attention on the provocative nature of the draw-Mohammed contest. After all, like a drunken, immodestly dressed rape victim, weren’t the draw-Mohammed contestants just asking for it?
If anything, I suspect Parry is being too optimistic about our progressive friends. Hypocritical cynicism is actually the best-case interpretation of their remarks. The worst is that they really don’t especially believe in the idea of free speech any more and are in the opening stages of reforming their position on it.
Have a look, for instance, at this YouGov poll which shows 51 percent of Democrats agreeing with the idea that they would support a law making it a crime to “advocate hatred against an identifiable group based on such things as their race, gender, religion, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation.” That’s a flat-out majority of Dems in favor of restricting free speech, with 28 percent saying they’re not sure, and only 21 percent saying they’d oppose such a law. We may be headed to a world where the first amendment is as politicized as the second.
The question is, philosophically, how will Democrats make the break? Hot Air’s Allahpundit argues,
I suspect that this change in attitude among Democrats may be tied to the Obama years and progressive triumphalism—it’s easy to be for banning speech when you hold all the power. It would be interesting to see what Democratic attitudes about criminalizing speech look like two years into the administration of the Most Dangerous Republican Ever! Who, of course, is TBD.
Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
