What If The Cartoons Were Mocking Jesus? February 19, 2006
BY MARK BROWN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Opinions Are Like Belly Buttons (everybody has one) -- aka: Brown Picks Lint from His Navel.
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Odds are that you would not be offended by seeing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb, seeing as how Muslims are a scant minority of this newspaper's readers.
But how would you feel about it if we ran a cartoon depicting Jesus Christ in a priest's garb sodomizing a choirboy to illustrate the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church?
I'll bet some of you would have a slightly different reaction to that.
Or what if that same cartoon depicted the choirboy as African-American, in light of the alleged abuse at St. Agatha's in North Lawndale?
Just reading the description probably causes the hair to stand up on the back of some of your necks, as I well appreciate.
Words can be powerful tools, pictures even more so. I considered substituting a milder description than sodomizing, just to tone it down. Self-censorship, you see.
But what if I took it even further, what if the cartoon's caption somehow incorporated Jesus using the "N" word? Or just to clarify that the point I'm trying to make is not based on race, let's make the choirboy a white girl and the caption with Jesus using the "C" word.
That's entirely different than the Muhammad cartoons, you may say.
The Muhammad cartoons are nowhere near as offensive as what I'm describing, you think.
Well, apparently they are to Muslims.
It's great to hear all the support that's being voiced around the country right now for the First Amendment in light of the Muhammad cartoon controversy -- all of it coming from people egging us on to print the cartoons.
Yes, we have the right to print the Danish newspaper's cartoons, just as we would have the right to print a cartoon such as the offensive ones I have imagined.
Having the freedom to print what we want carries some responsibility to consider how it will affect those on the receiving end, which is a balancing act we face every day.