Originally Posted by
Dan Savage
The American Taliban, rumor has it, is already up in arms about the poster for this year’s Folsom Street Fair, San Francisco’s annual, pan-sexual, family-friendly (really) celebration of leather, bondage, fetish, and S&M. The American Taliban will scream and yell about how no one would dare to mock Islam like this because Christians, being Christians, stupidly put up with these sorts of insults. (Well, now they do—a century or two ago the Pope could have anyone he liked burned at the stake.)
The mistake the Christians keep making, of course, is all that turning the other cheek crap. (Where did the hell did they get that retarded idea anway?) Outraged Muslims, on the other hand, famously riot, murder, bomb, kill, etc., when they’re provoked, and this murderousness protects their faith from similar outrages.
Well, not so much—not in USA, anyway, Glenn Greenwald pointed out at Salon. Theo Van Gough might take exception to Greenwald if he hadn’t been butchered on an Amsterdam street corner for insulting Islam. Still, most people that insult Islam—including this paper—seem get away with it.
I’m not sure what the American Taliban is driving at when they insist that a Griffin or a Folsom Street Fair wouldn’t insult Islam the way they insult Christianity. Do they admire the murderousness of radical Muslims? Or do they want to be treated with the deference granted batshit crazy murderers without actually having to go to all the trouble of murdering someone?
Of course Kathy Griffin is Catholic, so she was insulting her own religion, her own savior, and not someone else’s imaginary super friend. And Christian art and artists have created scads of iconic images over the last, oh, thousand or so years—including many overtly homoerotic images. The organizers of Folsom probably couldn’t insult Islam like this if they wanted to—Islam forbids representations of human form in art. What’s Folsom gonna do? Arrange riding crops in abstract geometric patterns?
And as the American Taliban are so fond of pointing out, most people in the United States are Christians; we’re not a Christian nation, but we’re certainly a nation overrun by Christians, steeped in Christian imagery, lousy with Christian metaphors. And it’s Christians in the United States that are aggressively seeking to regulate and control the sex lives of other Americans, Christian or not. When powerless people are attacked by powerful people—when conservative Christians go after gay people and kinky straight people—the powerless will respond the way the powerless always have: with insults, with mockery, and with humor.
And, come on, aren’t you conservative Christians always insisting that your faith is superior to Islam in every possible way? Haven’t conservative Christian leaders argued that Islam is incompatible with democracy and other western values? And isn’t shrugging off piddling little insults—do your worst, cartoonists, comediennes, and kinksters!—one of the ways Christianity proves that it’s a great, big, all-grown-up World Religion with a reformation and everything? Unlike, say, Islam?
So you don’t like Folsom’s posters, American Taliban. What are you going to do about it? I have an idea: Suck it, Jesus freaks.
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