Speech, speech

You know it’s not morning in America anymore when the comedians can’t tell a joke.

Jerry Seinfeld made headlines for saying in an ESPN radio interview he wouldn’t do shows on college campuses. The atmosphere is too politically correct.

Asked about it later, he complained on Late Night to host Seth Meyers, who seemed to fidget in his chair for where the conversation might be going, “They keep moving the lines in for no reason.” Seinfeld said he used to tell a joke about people scrolling through their cell phone contacts “like a gay French king.” Now audiences take offense. “To suggest that a gay person moves their hands in a flourishing motion,” Seinfeld said, “you now have to apologize for it. There’s a creepy PC thing out there that really bothers me.”

Seinfeld is rare among entertainers and public figures in general to complain that the lines of acceptable speech are moving, instead of himself moving in lockstep with them.

When poor women are raped who don’t happen to fit the social construct of the moment, the thought police go dumb and mute.

It’s not only speech challenging the new ethos on sexuality that’s targeted. Look at what happened to the illustrious PEN American Center’s literary gala when the group decided to award the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for courageous freedom of expression. Six prominent authors pulled out as gala table hosts. Then, like lemmings, nearly 200 of the group’s 4,000 members signed a protest letter, best-selling writers like Russell Banks, Joyce Carol Oates, and Michael Ondaatje. They cited the magazine’s cultural intolerance and Islamophobia—all in the wake of an attack by Islamic State gunmen that left 12 members of the magazine’s staff dead.

And as if they weren’t dead enough, satirist Garry Trudeau gave a speech accusing the Charlie Hebdo team of “punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority.”

Good thing the Doonesbury creator didn’t have to contend with the likes of George Bernard Shaw. The playwright and social critic, who was hardly an outcast with progressives of his day, wrote, “Islam is very different, being ferociously intolerant.” He called it a “Manifold Monotheism” that “becomes in the minds of very simple folk an absurdly polytheistic idolatry. … You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell.”

Or Winston Churchill, who had a tendency of punching downward so powerful it may have saved the free world for all kinds of satire and folly. Churchill said of Islam, “How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.”

Right now unspeakable things are happening in the name of Islam. A former newspaper editor in Baghdad this month sent me a photo of a young Yazidi woman, burned and disfigured beyond recognition after she refused to become an Islamic State bride. Hundreds of women are escaping to tell their stories of brutal sexual slavery, of rapes beyond number, of young girls sold to terrorist soldiers. And the Western literati—the Garry Trudeaus, the Joyce Carol Oateses, and the Ph.D.s who launched the women’s studies programs at a thousand campuses under the banner of upholding women in society—aren’t saying a word about those atrocities. When poor women are raped who don’t happen to fit the social construct of the moment, don’t happen to be the right disenfranchised minority, the thought police go dumb and mute.

With free speech in our so-called free society less free, it’s more and more important to speak boldly, to speak the truth, to speak in love. And that can involve satire and comedy, devices Jesus Himself used to good effect.

I treasure the words of Robert Gregory, a Maine lawyer and volunteer adviser to Bowdoin Christian Fellowship. When the fellowship got booted from campus last year after 40 years of service because it didn’t want to dilute its Christian leadership or its gospel message, Gregory took the heave-ho in stride: “I’m happy to go across the street. I’m happy to go to the basement. Christians have been sharing this message in sewers for hundreds of years.”

Yes, you culture warlords. Give us the lowest place.

Email mbelz@wng.org