I’ve been amazed & appaled by the recent “Christian” protests against the BBC’s airing of Jerry Springer the Opera, and was even more shocked this morning when I heard that some of the protestors had started threatening violence.
A couple of times in the last fortnight I’ve heard a joke by Bill Hicks. It seems very apt:
…I did that joke in Alabama, and these three rednecks met me after the show. “Hey buddy, c’mere. Hey Mister Comedian, c’mere.” Yeah, I love that move (makes shoving motion) “C’mere!” Not a physics major, I think that’s a safe bet. “Mister Funnyman, c’mere. Hey buddy, we’re Christians and we don’t like what you said.” I said, “then forgive me.”
There seems to be an increasing atmosphere of religious intolerance (that is, intolerance by the religious) which threatens to become like some of the worst bigotry of small-town USA or mountain-hideout Afghanistan. Coupled with the proposed new blasphemy law and the fact that the play Behzti (Dishonour) was recently taken off stage in Birmingham because of the actual violence of a group of Sikh protestors, something very sinister is going on. Could we be heading for a new dark ages?
It’s tempting to respond in kind, and when I spotted a clearly mentally sub-normal woman in the town centre on Saturday, propped up against a shop wall holding a scrawled piece of paper which read “BBC are sinners. Ban Jerry Springer blasphemy”, I felt like going up to her and punching her for daring to express a view which I found so offensive. But of course this is not the answer, we must do as Muriel Gray says in an extremely well-written article for the Sunday Herald. We must say:
Like the breast-beating, ignorant, woman-hating and gay-hating ruffians who desecrated our temple of free speech, you shame yourself to the very core, sir. But as civilisation and decency dictates, I will always defend your free, open and secure right to do so.
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