I didn’t do a very good job yesterday of explaining why I think the South Park Mohammed/death threats/censorship thing is similar to lots of things that have been caused by good, Jesus-fearing Americans. Glenn Greenwald lays it out much better, citing this:
A Fort Worth theater that had agreed to show a student-directed play with a gay Jesus character has withdrawn its offer. The board of directors of Artes de la Rosa, which runs The Rose Marine Theater on North Main Street, decided Thursday against offering the venue for the production of Corpus Christi, just one day after saying it would. A March performance set for a directing class at Tarleton State University in Stephenville was abruptly canceled after the school received threatening emails.
And recalling:
The Dixie Chicks were deluged with death threats for daring to criticize the Leader, forcing them to apologize out of fear for their lives.
I’d add that when George Tiller was murdered, the same people treating SouthParkGate as the worst thing ever were openly blaming the murder, not on the murderer or his associates, but on supporters of reproductive rights.
The Taliban wing of American Christianity just isn’t that different from the actual Taliban. The main difference I suppose is that there are no actual Taliban apologists writing for the New York Times.
russell
Bunuel’s “Obscure Object Of Desire” features, as kind of a dark running gag, a terrorist organization called the Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus.
Who knew.
DougJ
@russell:
Awesome!
ellaesther
Now that I’ll agree with. The murder of George Tiller is not appreciably different than the murder of anyone else for “religious” reasons.
I would argue that the Taliban is a smidge bit better organized, but that’s honestly a quibble. Those who would kill the likes of George Tiller are not different in essence, just in scope.
Keith G
The amount of sky-god worshipers who get mad enough to disdain peace is interesting…Its so cliched, but they are so much the same.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
This:
can’t be said enough. They both have blood on their hands and both like to use threats of (or actual) violence to achieve their ends. They both want to control others, to make them do what they want them to do. To live the way they want you to live. If you aren’t with them on this then get out of their way.
Or else.
Nope, not much difference at all.
New Yorker
Right. The actions of many religious people are the greatest argument for the superiority of atheism there is.
Jesus might have been gay (check out select passages from the Gospel of John). Muhammad was probably insane. Moses never existed, but the fictional character “Moses” from the books of Exodus through Deuteronomy was a genocidal maniac.
And religious people can take away my right to say the above when I’m dead.
Mike Kay
I’m old enough to remember the wacky protests over “The Last Temptation of Christ” cuz it contained the tame theory that satan tempted Jesus with living a normal human live, including finding a girlfriend, but still resisted.
And who can forget pee christ controversy.
DougJ
@ellaesther:
It should also be noted: Muslim extremists have not actually killed the creators of South Park. I think it’s fair to say that a real murder is much worse than a unfulfilled threat.
ed
Eric Rudolph. Also. Too.
Short Bus Bully
“THE AMERICAN TALIBAN”
This phrase needs to be echoed through the MSM and blogosphere until people start realizing that the difference between the right wing of American politics (the Confederacy) and the terrorists we are “fighting” across the sea is essentially nil.
rootless-e
@New Yorker: dude, we talk about people like you during passover.
arguingwithsignposts
1,400 words to get to the point you made earlier. IOW, tl;dr. Of course, he does link to Balloon Juice, which may explain the backscratching.
Alice Blue
@ Mike Kay:
My husband and I went to see that movie simply because it was driving the fundies into such a lather. A guard checked my handbag before we were allowed into the theater; apparently they had received some bomb threats.
arguingwithsignposts
@Short Bus Bully:
na ganna happen. Nobody in the MSM is going to use the phrase The American Taliban. Greenwald is a blogger at Salon, which is, IIRC, an online only outlet. Maybe Olbermann will use the term, or Maddow. But that will be the extent of it.
Because as much as we hate to admit it, those “American Taliban” live and work next door to us, and they are just as American as apple pie in their looks and demeanor on the outside (c.f. Billy Graham and his son Franklin). You can throw “white” in there as well.
aimai
I really liked that Greenwald piece, and its something that lots of us were trying to say before. There’s tons of christianist terrorism in this country–it extends to the treatment of female rape victims in hospital emergency rooms, for christ’s sake (sic). Its kind of like the joke that, to the media, things sound much worse if you add “on the internet” to the end of the sentence. Most Americans/the media act as if you add the words “by a muslim” this makes the first part of the sentence totally, astoundingly, frighteningly weird. For example:
teens learn about sex
teens learn about sex on the internet!
female rape victims denied appropriate medical care
female rape victims denied appropriate medical care on the internet!
female rape victims denied appropriate medical care *by muslims*
female rape victims denied appropriate medical care by catholic hospitals…
abortion provider killed
abortion provider killed on the internet
abortion provider killed by muslim
abortion provider killed by christian
Oh, I guess the operative scare word wasn’t “on the internet” or “by muslims” so much as it was a larger phrase like “by scary, bigoted, narrow minded, religious sect.”
aimai
Mark S.
Oh geez, The Last Temptation. I remember all of that bullshit. Then I saw it and realized all of the complaining was by people who had never seen it, since there was absolutely nothing in it that could have offended a Christian with an IQ above room temperature.
beltane
And why not have an actual Taliban apologist writing for the NYT? Would anyone even notice the inclusion of one more sanctimonious prick on the op-ed page?
Better yet, the Sunday paper should have a whole section devoted to the ravings of religious extremists; there is nothing that would do more to promote the separation of church and state.
El Cid
Maybe someone should smear a cross made out of deep fried funnel cakes on a window somewhere.
handy
@Mark S.:
I found Judas Iscariot having a Brooklyn accent pretty offensive, actually. Then again not everybody can be an Ian McShane.
slag
When I’m feeling diplomatic (hey-it happens), I tend to object to inflammatory statements like these. But in this case, I agree that the comparison isn’t made nearly often enough. If these people got their way, this country would look a lot like Iran. Just not in a superficial we’d-all-be-wearing-turbans kind of way.
OriGuy
@DougJ:
Too bad the same can’t be said for Theo van Gogh. Certainly he was a jerk, but that shouldn’t be a capital crime.
Joseph Nobles
You know, Taliban is Pashto for students. A nice synonym for student in English is disciple. And I’d argue that was a better translation under the circumstances, except that there is an Arabic word for disciple already (taleb is a loan word to Pashto from Arabic).
Three-nineteen
So are you saying the best response to threats of violence is to give them what they want? If not, what do you suggest?
freelancer
OMFG, I leave to go get dinner, and DougJ posts about Christianist butthurt? (Not that kind of Christianist butthurt, the other kind)
I wrote the definitive post on this whole subject the other day because one of my co-workers forwarded me an email about outrage over Corpus Christie. I sent the post to her the next day.
It’s a doozy.
/blogwhore
Zhirem
I have oft wondered, whether the only difference between our zealots and their zealots is the name of their God.
Much Evil has been done in Their Name, regardless of just what that name might be.
I am not against religion, but I think any reasonable person would approach it with a healthy degree of skepticism, if only based upon the historical record…
– Zhirem
burnspbesq
@New Yorker:
I have no desire to take away your right to say those things. You want to appear ignorant and intolerant, knock yourself out.
robertdsc
I thought Dubya said we were fighting them over there so we wouldn’t have to fight them here. Another thing he fucked up on.
Mark S.
@freelancer:
Ha! It was worth reading all the way to the end.
Yutsano
@freelancer:
Yes. Yes you are. It’s all good though as the post is very well-written. I guess we can overlook it just this once.
Joe Buck
There is Biblical evidence that Jesus was gay, in the Gospel of John: “the disciple Jesus loved” was reclining on Jesus’s breast during the Last Supper; he also appears in a number of other passages. Only one disciple is described this way.
Remember that the text in question was written in Greek, for a Greek audience, in an era where it was standard for revered teachers to have a young lover). However, I don’t really believe this, since the older gospels have no such story; what I think is that the young male lover was invented to impress the Greeks; back then, this was how noted philosophers were expected to act.
So either the Bible is literally true and Jesus had a male lover, or it’s just a bunch of legends, with some connection to actual history but with many embellishments and fabrications. You pick.
Ash Can
@slag:
I’m a Christian, and I don’t find it the least bit inflammatory or objectionable. Quite the contrary; it’s right on target, and the terrorists that have infested Christianity need to be called out for what they are. Just like the people who destroyed the World Trade Center, they use religion as an excuse to try to force others to change their behavior, and, worse, as a justification for using violence as a means to that end. They’re the same kind of dangerous, unhinged fanatic; only the religion is different.
jenniebee
Isn’t there a difference though, all the same, between George Tiller “provoking” the Christianiban by providing medical services and Trey and Matt “provoking” Muslims by intentionally and deliberately provoking them for no purpose other than to provoke them and demonstrate that they can?
I think the better analogy is to Don Imus being pulled by a private network for callously denigrating a large portion of his sponsors’ customer base. South Park may be art, but it’s art for profit and as such subject to the censorship of the marketplace. If Trey and Matt have something artistic to say, they can rent a theater, or buy one and show a cartoon of Mohammed eating cereal or shagging sheep or anything in between, but their status as commercially successful artists doesn’t entitle all their art to commercial success or even commercial broadcast. It is reasonable for Comedy Central to refuse to air a show that they think would hurt them financially (it’s also reasonable for them to stir up controversy to get free publicity and boost ratings).
In the end, what’s going on here isn’t that Trey & Matt have something to say and a network isn’t letting them say it, it’s that a network hired T&M to create content for them and doesn’t want to use some of that content. We don’t say that a writer is censored if publishers turn his novel down as unprofitable; censorship is what occurs when the writer is barred from printing the book at his own expense. The first is the business of the press; the second is the free exercise of it.
Little Dreamer
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
The question is: “Why”?
If they believe in God, they should be happy that the masses are living by those values that they don’t accept and allow the great unwashed to be who they are, because otherwise, it appears they are too concerned about changing THIS world when their future is supposed to be invested in an afterlife (and making sure they qualify for the accomodations getting there – I hear it’s not easy to qualify for).
I think they are too much of this world, and it’s cramping the rest of us here who aren’t expecting to take the J train to an otherworldly utopia of rented mansions (owned by God, and not in joint tenancy) and gold streets (who is going to polish and clean those suckers?).
They should be worried about earning their wings, not harassing those of us who aren’t even trying to book that flight. Jesus told them to kick the dust off of their feet, walk away and pay no attention to those who weren’t likeminded. Why do they keep trying to involve themselves in the politics and happenings of this world?
jenniebee
Rereading – I should clarify – my point is not that the only ideas that should be allowed enter the public discourse are the narrow smear of pablum that a corporate distribution structure thinks fits their target demographic. Rather, that our dependence on the corporate distribution of ideas lends itself both to the narrowing of those ideas and also to our diminishing ability to distinguish corporate speech from the speech of individual humans.
And personally, I think this Muslim outrage is a hell of a lot less outrageous than the Christian attacks on Tiller and Last Temptation of Christ, or the Muslim outrage against Salman Rushdie’s novels, specifically because pissing people off was incidental to what Tiller – especially Tiller – and the people behind Last Temptation and Salman Rushdie were trying to do. Parker and Stone’s primary intention is to get a rise out of some Muslims somewhere because they’re an easy target and it gets publicity for Parker and Stone. Picking on Muslims is creating about the safest “controversy” possible in America today. Edgy it ain’t.
Little Dreamer
@Mark S.:
Yeah, all that blood, that wasn’t offensive, that was just Sunday breakfast!
Little Dreamer
@Joe Buck:
__
Umm, those aren’t your only choices. It could be (and is most likely the case) that some things are true, while a whole lot of it isn’t.
It is pretty difficult to argue that the Bible is wholly inspired by God and is useful for correction and right teaching when over 600 pieces of it contradict other pieces of it.
Little Dreamer
@jenniebee:
__
I would hope there is a difference. Dr. Tiller was performing a medical service (and a service that does serve a function, whether you believe it is necessary or not is up for debate, but, I see where he was serving a medical function) and I’m sure he didn’t spend his time thinking about how much he might be pissing off the hard right authoritarians.
So, are you suggesting that righties believe killing a doctor is justified to force him to stop doing what he was doing? Wasn’t the whole idea that Tiller was supposed to stop taking lives? So, they justify that by saying it’s okay to take life? Do they even hear themselves?
Mark S.
@Little Dreamer:
Huh? I admit I haven’t seen it in years, but I don’t think was anymore violent than The Passion.
YellowJournalism
@ellaesther:
Thank you for giving me a great way to explain to some people I know why the extreme Christian right is just as dangerous and hateful as the Taliban. The organization and scope are not there for the fundamentalist Christians, but the potential and the intent sure as hell is.
fucen tarmal
@Mike Kay:
the real protest should have been that it was such a terrible movie, to advance such a noble cause as inviting the angry protest of those willing to judge merely on spec.
i remember seeing the movie in high school, not really being all that impressed by it, but then going to college in a state where it had been banned from being shown state-wide.
there was a well orchestrated(i’m guessing) secondary fuss up when the movie was being shown on campus, first time the movie has played anywhere in the state! a full year plus later… the maranathas fullfilled their duty, signs and protests, the whole bit. i told folks who wanted to see it, not to bother. but if you wanted to see the show outside, or make some statement by attending, have at it….but the movie was truly not worth it on its own merits…
the best review i heard or read, was by joe bob briggs, as part of a segment on the movie channel. though i suspect its lost to the pre-internet saving of everything.
Little Dreamer
@Mark S.:
I thought you were talking about The Passion, am I wrong?
What movie did you allude to and I got it mixed up?
Apologies! I make mistakes sometimes, but I’m also big enough to admit it.
Mark S.
@Little Dreamer:
I was talking about The Last Temptation of Christ. It caused a helluva ruckus because fundies thought it portrayed Jesus having sex with Mary Magdalene, but that’s just the temptation Satan presents him while he’s dying on the cross.
Paul in KY
@freelancer: How did your co-worker respond to your essay?
smith
The Dixie Chicks apologized? Didn’t they just apologize for saying it overseas instead of the States?
Well the South park creators are libertarian/borderline conservative so anything they do or say will get handled with kid gloves by the MSM. Not that I don’t enjoy the show anyway even though if they had real balls they’d go after people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
I was a little young at the time but I vaguely remember the Last Temptation of Christ controversy. What a lot to do about nothing. I swear conservatives go to movies and watch TV shows nowadays just looking for stuff to bitch and moan about. Didn’t some conservative publish a book recently that conservatives were happier in their lives than liberals? Could have fooled me from the conservatives I personally know and read about.
twiffer
@Mike Kay: hmm. and here i thought the controversy was over judas being in on the whole “giving jesus over to the authorities” thing. can’t be getting rid of our favorite scapegoat, can we?
Evinfuilt
If you listen to people like Donahue, you’ll realize a lot of American Christianists just have a massive case of Fatwah Envy.
Frank
The Orwellian disconnect is fascinating.Before 9/11 it was conservatives that condemned any percieved insult to Islam on the grounds that it was disrespectful to a great religion.I’m thinking of the Salman Rushdie controversy and any feminists that decried the treatment of women in muslim cultures.These people were derided as vulgar, anti- relgious liberals.Poseurs like Camille Paglia would condemn journalist (i.e., liberals) for not comprehending the profound displays of religious belief seen in these cultures.Then 9/11 happens and suddenly liberals are the ones that supposedly tie themselves in knots trying not to offend Islam.
Uplift
Of course, the former spokesman for the Taliban was a student at Yale for a while.