Cargill Talks about Freedom Of Speech Under Attack

Earlier this week, Michael D. Brown, Former Under Secretary of Homeland Security and Huffington Post contributor announced in his column that “freedom of speech in this country is under attack,” after several newspapers bowed to religious pressure and pulled a controversial comic strip from the long running series Non Sequitur, titled “Where’s Muhammad.” While the strip doesn’t actually feature Muhammad, it was deliberately provocative, making a political punchline out of someone else’s beliefs. Cool. Freedom of speech. I’m 100% down with that. What troubles me about Brown’s editorial wasn’t that the first thing the Former Under Secretary of Homeland Security does when he gets his paper is run to the funnies section, but that he is oblivious to just how right he is.

You see, in both the papers he cites, the Denver Post and the Washington Post, what you also didn’t find this past weekend were advertisements for that weekend’s release of the horror remake I Spit on Your Grave. Unrated after 5 submissions to the MPAA – each receiving the dreaded NC-17, and earning it every time, I assure you – the film was only able to open on 12 screens nationwide. You see, Christian fundamentalist groups have long threatened theater and video store chains with boycotts if they carry or show films carrying the NC-17 rating – and they did so before it existed when it was called the X rating. (Fun fact, there is no XXX rating; that was a marketing gimmick invented by the porn industry.) Newspapers and television stations are similarly barred (by threat of boycott by these same religious groups) from accepting advertising on behalf of NC-17 rated films.

Brown is angry because a small group of religious extremists believe so strongly that it is a sin to draw or view the image of Muhammad that they are pressuring institutions into avoiding doing so, whether they plan to buy those papers or not. I’m angry because a small group of religious extremists believe so strongly that it is a sin to view sex or extreme violence in movies that they are pressuring institutions into avoiding doing so, whether they plan to attend those movies or not. The difference? In this country one extremist group is bigger than the other.
read the rest at Hollywood.com/CounterPoint