The recent shooting at the awful Pamela Gellar's Drawing Mohammed "contest"--a deliberately inflammatory event if ever there was one--seems to have elicited a certain amount of debate regarding the issues in the title. Given the debate, I finally felt compelled to weigh in. If you're paying attention, then you know I don't blog much. It's a regrettable side-effect of having far too many hobbies for one's peace of mind, I'm afraid. So the fact that I felt it necessary to write this when I definitely should be cleaning the house should say something.
Gellar is reprehensible. Possessed by the burrowing mind-worm of the ultra-conservative dogma dominating a certain sector of society, she's either a con-man, like so many of them, or a true believer. If the latter, then I guarantee that she's guilty of an almost pathological fear of chaos. Carrying an innately authoritarian personality, she'd have a not-so-secret desire to be told exactly what to do, coupled with a perfect willingness to tell others what to do. Her faction would very much love to take away certain basic freedoms from the US citizen, including but not limited to the freedom to be Muslim, to worship as we please or not at all, to pursue knowledge unfettered by censorship, to seek one's own wisdom in true Gnostic or even agnostic fashion, to do with one's body as one pleases, to be healthy and secure. There is nothing I've heard about her or any of her ilk that makes me want to offer them respect that isn't outweighed by a hundred things that make me wish to withold it.
You can imagine my quandary when I find myself agreeing with them.
Her "contest" was an ill-advised, bullying attempt to inflame the Muslim community and spin the almost-inevitable result so that her faction ended up looking like the oppressed victim. An added bonus would be to be able to use it as well to inflame the passions of those like me who would not normally agree with her. Well, dammit, it worked. And there's a reason it did.
It's ironic in the extreme, although far from unexpected, that the fundamentalists here find themselves hating the Muslim fundamentalists so very much. They agree on almost everything. Neither of them want me to be able to be openly atheist, neither of them approve of extramarital sex (except for concubines in the case of ISIL, and, frankly, if the fundamentalists were honest about the contents of their scripture, they really ought to have no objection to it). They both hate secular government, atheists, abortion, intentionally single and childless women, birth control, homosexuality and homosexuals. The fact that they disagree on exactly which Abramic text to read, and whether Jesus was indeed the Messiah, would seem like such a small thing to an outsider like me. Although I have no doubt whatsoever that it seems like an unbridgeable chasm to them.
Gellar's event, as I've said, was deliberately inflammatory. She knew that some wannabe ISIL soldier was going to do exactly what these two screw-ups did. She was counting on it. She'd have been disappointed if nothing had happened. I gotta admit, taking all that into account, she showed great courage in personally attending, but then again, what does death matter to a True Believer. Or, as Scalia put it, "...death is no big deal." The wannabes had the same damaged thinking, except they were too dumb to realize that they were playing directly into her hands.
But ISIL would be fine with a world order where such speech was punishable by death. They've said it, and demonstrated it, a thousand times. That's not OK either.
We ourselves have been guilty of hypocrisy. And the fundies have rightfully called us out on that. How, after all, can we cheer on the Satanists taking advantage of constitutional freedoms to force the erection of a Satanic statue on public grounds--a deliberately inflammatory act if ever there was one--and not cheer on Gellar's horrid little art show? They are the same thing. The fact that one act was delivered against the fundies and one was delivered by the fundies shouldn't make a jot of difference. That it does to so many of us probably speaks more to latent disgust with our own home-grown extremists than to an intentional bias, but it is not a just or honest position to take.
Muslims have no special protections, nor should they. The Westboro church is deliberately inflammatory to me as an atheist, to any gay or lesbian out there, to milder, more liberal churches the whole nation over. But they don't get a free pass, and if they murder a gay man they will be called to task for it.
Let me put it another way. To blame Gellar in this instance is identical to blaming abortion doctors for abortion clinic bombings. For their own murders. After all, they should have known that what they were doing was going to piss off the ultra-Right. They didn't have to do abortions. They are doctors; surely they could have found other (and probably more lucrative) employment.
I am not responsible for the hurt feelings of Muslims. I refuse to be. Just as I'm not responsible for superChristians that I piss off by telling them that they can't possibly follow all the things in the Bible without going to prison, just as gays aren't responsible for Christians pissed off by their desire to bump uglies that look a lot like their own.
Screw 'em. I hate Gellar. I hate pretty much everything she stands for, and that's saying something considering I lived in the South my whole life. But the reason I hate them like I do is because I value freedom and they want to take it away from me. Just like ISIL wanted to take away freedom (and life) from Gellar. There's absolutely no damn difference between 'em except that the local Taliban is working within the rules for now. So long as they play nice, I'll put up with 'em. But I'm just too anti-authoritarian to roll over and let any religion tell me what I can and can't do. Showing tolerance to those who refuse to show you tolerance is a position that can only be occupied when there is an extreme disparity in strength, for instance if the ones you are tolerating refuse to use modern weapons.
Let offer one more supporting argument. All my life I've been rabidly anti-authoritarian, to the point of being contrarian. And even I've found myself intentionally editing this damn thing, all in the interests of protecting others in my life. Pain of death makes you self-censor, and it's wrong. Absolutely wrong. I've been rather intentionally cowardly, pulling punches that I'd have delivered against the Christian right because the Christian right is unlikely to try to kill me even if I wear my sentiments on my sleeve. Since I'm not currently willing to risk everything like Salman Rushdie did, we need someone who will, or soon everyone is going to be self-censoring all the time and suddenly, without a law being passed, we've lost a right. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth to even say it, but we need someone like Gellar for this.