Defending the Right to Offend

by Michael Moynihan
Reason
January 10, 2011

https://www.legal-project.org/1056/defending-the-right-to-offend

Excerpt:

On December 9, 2010, the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason magazine,Reason.com, and Reason.tv, held an event celebrating free speech at New York City's The Box and commemorating adult filmaker John Stagliano's victory over federal obscenity charges (go here for our coverage of that spectacular waste of taxpayer dollars). The idea behind the event was to draw attention to Reason's ongoing work in defense of free expression and to call for a new free speech movement that reaches beyond traditional categories of left and right. What follows is a text written for the occasion by Michael C. Moynihan.

Living in an era that forces editorial cartoonists into witness protection, in a culture that barely bats an eye when the fed­eral government prosecutes "indecent" films, the free speech battles of the past seem almost quaint by comparison. Recall that in 1968, a jury huffed that I Am Curious: Yellow, a plodding Swedish film that succeeded in making sex unsexy, was "utterly without social value." The decision was soon overturned on appeal, the forecasted moral collapse failed to materialize, and Swedish embassies across Christendom were left unmo­lested. Andres Serrano's photograph "Piss Christ," the Brooklyn Museum's "Sensation" exhibit, Robert Mapplethorpe's bullwhip all provoked pickets, editorials, angry letters—and they all provoked debate.

In 1989, when Iran's theocracy suborned the murder of novelist Salman Rushdie for having written a supposedly blasphemous book, The Satanic Verses, only a handful of intellectuals, habitués of both left and right, attacked the author for being impolite to "a billion" religious adherents. Author Roald Dahl whimpered that "In a civilized world we all have a moral obligation to apply a modicum of censorship to our own work in order to reinforce this principle of free speech." Twenty years ago this was a shockingly contrarian sentiment, today it's depressingly de rigueur.

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