Don't be offended

...It is similarly important to be offended at someone who ridicules religious symbols, our own or those of others...

...In an interesting New York Times Book Review survey of several books on the Salman Rushdie affair, Edward Mortimer writes, "Perhaps he was insensitive to treat so playfully a subject that for millions of people is deadly serious (though I cannot help feeling that coming to tolerate such playfulness is a necessary step for Muslims on the road to enlightenment and freedom...

...it is, however, seldom if ever all right to take offense at what believers would call blasphemy...

...To the extent that religious people buy into this mentality, we accept the relative unimportance of what we claim to be about...

...We can agree wholeheartedly with the offense taken by Nora Dunn and George Will...

...Another assumption is that the word "enlightenment" does not mean clear and unencumbered perception, but rather the particular set of beliefs that saw their birth during the Enlightenment: secularism is assumed to be superior to religion...

...to be offended...

...A whole set of assumptions lies between those parentheses...

...Someone white may not portray someone half-white and half-oriental, but someone oriental may...

...Is there no animosity, no banked down hatred and resentment in Rushdie's work...

...In any case, I wonder why a laborer who hates his job on an assembly line should fund, against his will (we are talking, after all, about taxes), the activities of an artist who loves the work he is doing, even the most benign and sweet sort of artist, even a carver of mallard ducks or painter of apple-dotted landscapes...

...the objection is that racism itself is false, a wrong understanding...

...It is a step in the right direction, though stillquitelimited.lt is all right to take offense at Andrew "Dice" Clay or 2 Live Crew...

...We must, on occasion, have the good grace to be offended...

...This isn't a question of censorship, but of civilized taste elevated to the level of moral action...

...It was good, anyway, to see Nora Dunn refuse to appear on "Saturday Night Live" on the night of Andrew "Dice" Clay's appearance, and then to see Sinead O'Connor also refuse to appear after Dunn's refusal...

...This is an article of faith in a liberal democracy, an appropriate one...

...There are limits, though, to those areas in which we are allowed to be offended...

...Are people like Andrew "Dice" Clay, 2 Live Crew, and racist skinheads not being playful, at least at some levels...

...George Will saw through this ugly condescension in a recent (and excellent) Newsweek column, perhaps the only Will column I've agreed with in years...

...Dunn's action was a healthy beginning...

...The reasons for which we are supposed to be careful of the religious beliefs of others, however, is not that religion represents anything real, or that an antireligious mentality is, like racism, based in illusion...

...This question to the side, Peter Steinfels quoted a Manhattan writer in a New York Times article on this controversy, and I've been thinking about a divide she illuminates with rare concision: I am now unable to display a creche at the taxpayers' expense or on public property-unless I soak it in urine, in which case I can get a government grant...

...His playfulness is to be regarded as amusing by people who see in Mohammed a prophet sent to reveal God's will to the human race, as if God's mercy didn't really matter all that much...

...and the collective understanding of a community centered around a belief that some truths are radiant-a belief that the sacred matters more than anything else-is considered socially irrelevant...

...and I can't believe the naivete of those who believe that government funding ever exists independently of a degree of government control...

...The idea that one race effectively cancels out the other would be agreed to by Hitler's theorists and by the people who enforced the old miscegenation laws in a number of American states, but it's odd to see it coming from liberals...

...The idea of the sacred is assumed to be something about which no one will be publicly serious or passionate...

...the audience response makes it clear that Clay plays to his audience's worst instincts...

...The responses of many critics to the Mapplethorpe exhibit, and to the infamous photograph of a crucifix in a tank of urine, made all the objectors seem cut from the same fundamentalist mold...

...May no white actor portray Othello-or black actor portray white southerner Big Daddy or the Italian Romeo, or oriental actor portray the clearly Scottish Macbeth...

...This aside, does the decision cancel out the New York performance of Noh and Kabuki dramas, where men traditionally portray women...

...When the Supreme Court allowed the idea of community standards to play a role in the definition of prohibitable obscenity, the definition was considered too vague by many opponents of censorship...

...But there is a set of community standards which prevail among secular folks, and they define what is obscene, and what is not, which thinking is correct, and which isn't, with all the firmness and all the rigid absurdity of a Jesse Helms deciding which sorts of art ought not to be paid for by the taxpayer...

...Some of my best friends (and indeed half of my family) are Asian...

...To be offended at antireligious language or behavior, however, is to reveal a narrow and unenlightened spirit...

...Enlightenment and freedom are to be found in the toleration of "playfulness" about a sacred subject-one in which Rushdie does not believe...

...My doubts about government funding boil down to wondering whether the government should fund the arts at all, given the fact that millions of Americans don't have and can't afford the most minimal health insurance...

...It is all right, correct-think would say, to be offended at slurs against women and racial minorities and homosexuals- indeed, it is obligatory...

...Another absurdity is the argument advanced by some critics that the violent and woman-hating lyrics of 2 Live Crew are an expression of black culture, and therefore should be looked at with some indulgence rather than with disgust...

...I don't mean that we should try to spend public money on sacred art, or censor those who disagree with us...

...Our objection to racist slurs, however, is not merely that they are insensitive to the feelings of those who would be offended by them...

...It is more on the order of not calling someone's child or mate ugly or stupid...

...The assumption is, however, that racism and sexism are about the real world, whereas religion is about something less important than our social arrangements and agreed-upon standards of justice...

...personal autonomy is an ideal...

...The absurd lengths to which this "correct-think" can be taken was revealed recently in a decision by Actors' Equity, reversed when the play's New York run was canceled, to refuse a white actor permission to portray a Eurasian on the New York stage...

...Anyone who has heard just a little (it goes a very long way) of Clay's woman-hating, gay-baiting attempts at humor can't really buy into the notion that this satirizes macho attitudes...

...Skinhead musicians could make the same claim for their diatribes against Jews and Asians and blacks...

...There is either an ignorance of what culture means here, or a refusal to make distinctions, which is equivalent to putting Andrew "Dice" Clay and Bach in the same category because both represent white culture...

...Mortimer speaks of "sensitivity" here, as if it were a question of being considerate of others' feelings, and of course this is the beginning of civility...

...but where will this lead...