Saturday, March 31, 2007

Sauce for the goose and all that

Updated Or, if you prefer, there's the one about whose ox is gored. From The Guardian (UK) for Saturday:
[A]n exhibition by an international artist to be held in mid-town Manhattan was cancelled after a campaign was launched against it on the ground that it was disrespectful towards Christianity.

My Sweet Lord, a 6ft representation of Jesus, was to have been unveiled over holy week in a gallery on Lexington Avenue but was withdrawn under fire from the Catholic League, an organisation of religious conservatives with 300,000 members. The group objected to the fact that the sculpture is made of more than 200lbs of chocolate and that the figure's genitalia are on display. ...

Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League, said the work was a direct assault on Christians. "All those involved are lucky that angry Christians don't react the way extremist Muslims do when they're offended."
Riiight. And just maybe part of the difference is that when such so-called "Christians" demand religious orthodoxy they're neither immediately labeled "extremists" by people screaming "Freedom of speech! Freedom of speech!" at them, nor are they derided as religious bigots. And that in turn is most likely because of "the overwhelming force of the religious right," as The Guardian called it. Which is fair because, after all, "might makes right" is a central tenet of Christianity.

Isn't it?

Updated with a postscript: Donahue, who had said the Roger Smith hotel where the gallery is located would "rue the day" it agreed to host the exhibit, said after the exhibition was canceled that because
we did not like the way the Roger Smith Hotel handled the decision to drop the display, we have no intention of contacting the 500 organizations that we alerted to this assault on Christian sensibilities to inform them that the exhibition has been canceled.
Even victory is not enough, in other words. Only crawling submission will do. Cross us and we will not only defeat you, we will destroy you. Because we're Christians.

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