Christopher Mackay’s Blog

Pharyngula: Bloggers, you have a job to do: Expelled

In a story called “Evolution of religious bigotry”, Jonah Goldberg says a few curious things about Darwin car emblems.

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there’s the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers.

Why should anyone care what he — or anyone else — finds offensive? No one has the right not to be offended.

Why does he imagine that people with Darwin emblems on their cars are any more or less smug than people with Jesus fish?

Do Republicans with GOP logos on their bumpers show smug superiority over Democrats? Of course not: it just means they support one party, not the other.

The hypocrisy is even more glaring. Darwin fish are often stuck next to bumper stickers promoting tolerance or admonishing random motorists that “hate is not a family value.”

Darwin fish are also commonly stuck next to Honda logos, Automobile Association stickers, license plates and “This car climbed Mt. Washington” stickers. So what?

But the whole point of the Darwin fish is intolerance; similar mockery of a cherished symbol would rightly be condemned as bigoted if aimed at blacks or women or, yes, Muslims.

Disagreement with is a long, long way from intolerance of.

Darwin fish are, for many, a defensive response to creationism and its aggressive and dishonest cousin, Intelligent Design. ID pretends to be a non-religious scientific theory, but it’s just religious creationism with God removed (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) so it can demand entry into public schools. It isn’t science at all. It is “Lying for Jesus”.

As Christopher Caldwell once observed in the Weekly Standard, Darwin fish flout the agreed-on etiquette of identity politics. “Namely: It’s acceptable to assert identity and abhorrent to attack it. A plaque with ‘Shalom’ written inside a Star of David would hardly attract notice; a plaque with ‘Usury’ written inside the same symbol would be an outrage.”

Like the way Goldberg attacks the Darwin emblem as “smug”, “hypocritical”, “intolerant” and “annoying”?

The only thing Goldberg is missing here is that fish (or something close enough to fish for marketing purposes) did evolve legs. (Darwin fish isn’t a very accurate name, is it? Once fish evolve legs, they aren’t fish any more, are they?)

The Darwin emblem is not, to me, a mockery of a Christian symbol — it’s a biologically-appropriate symbol representing evolution. Yes, it calls to mind the Christian fish; and that resonance makes it that much more effective. But you don’t need any awareness of the tradition of the Christian fish symbol to understand what the Darwin emblem represents.

Goldberg’s charge does bring another symbol to mind, though:

This is an explicit example of what Goldberg says he sees in the Darwin emblem. That is a smug, superior, attack, but it’s nothing like the Darwin emblem.

But the most annoying aspect of the Darwin fish is the false bravado it represents. It’s a courageous pose without consequence. Like so much other Christian-baiting in American popular culture, sporting your Darwin fish is a way to speak truth to power on the cheap.

So Jonah Goldberg, in a story where he brands people with Darwin emblems as intolerant hypocrites, can’t imagine any possible repercussions for publicly denying belief in gods? Now that’s hard to believe.

Far from only censoring extreme graphic or suggestive content, this article in The Independent outlines some of the mundane things that were censored in Ireland in years past:

Confessions of an Irish censor: why Clark Gable, ‘Casablanca’ and Cliff got the chop - Europe, News - Independent.co.uk: “Such seemingly inoffensive titles as Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Brief Encounter, The Quiet Man and On the Waterfront were also banned or heavily censored. In all, about 11,000 films were cut and about 2,500 completely banned.”

The article cites some of the earlier censors’ preoccupations, which included:

• dancing (special mention for the Rumba)
• kissing (an ‘unsanitary salute’!), and
• “the antics of Elvis Presley with his most suggestive abdominal dancing”

Fortunately, this kind of censorship is coming to an end in Ireland, but it clearly shows what ridiculous lengths people will go to control what other people think.

Hardly seems like the time to begin censorship in Canada.

globeandmail.com:

Evangelist takes credit for film crackdown: “A well-known evangelical crusader is claiming credit for the federal government’s move to deny tax credits to TV and film productions that contain graphic sex and violence or other offensive content.”

Televangelists like Charles McVety qualify as offensive content, don’t they? I wouldn’t dream of censoring them, though: they have every right to be offensive.

This is more nonsense from the people that brought us moral indignation and outrage as their best response to jazz in the 1930s, Elvis’ pelvic gyrations in the 1950s, and purple Teletubbies in the 1990s.

McVety goes on to say:

It’s fitting with conservative values, and I think that’s why Canadians voted for a Conservative government.

Please. If Canadians had voted for a Conservative government, Liberals, NDP and Bloq members wouldn’t out-number Tories in Parliament, would they? In fact, more than 63% of Canadians didn’t vote for the Conservatives in 2006, so it might be more accurate to say that most Canadians don’t value Conservatives…

What the federal election results from 2006 showed was that Canadians didn’t want a repeat of the Chrétien government’s Québec-referendum advertising scandal (and, by extension, Paul Martin).

If McVety’s radical evangelical agenda actually reflected Canadians’ wishes we wouldn’t have Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson going to such lengths to distance themselves from McVety, who represents exactly what so many Canadians expected from the Reform Alliance Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.

Parents are more than smart enough decide for themselves when to turn off their TVs, or whether to bring their children to see films like Young People Fucking. They certainly don’t need self-appointed moral authorities like McVety and their delicate sensibilities to tell them what they should — and what they shouldn’t be allowed — to think.

Update: March 4, 2008

As a follow-up, this appeared on Canada.com today:

No censorship threat in Bill C-10: Verner: “‘We are far from censorship here. We are just putting forward an intention from our government and (from) the former Liberal government just to make sure that we will take fiscal measure to make sure that the Canadian taxpayers’ money won’t fund extreme violence, child pornography or something like that,’ Verner said at a press conference.”

Of course, there’s no need to address these issues with Bill C-10; there’s existing legislation for that. So why do we need the changes to the tax rebate structure introduced by C-10?

Further, when asked if C-10 was influenced by McVety, Minister Verner issued the following non-denial:

I never met with that guy and there’s no meeting scheduled in my agenda…

which says precisely nothing about McVety’s influence.