New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | March 23, 2005

In America, government funds blasphemous artists; in Russia, funds gulag for artists! What a country! Cathy Young surveys a culture war that makes the kerfuffle over Damien Hirst look like a pillow fight.

Comments

|3.23.05 @ 1:17PM|#

What I can't get over is that the article mentions sentencing these people to a penal colony. Didn't penal colonies get buried with Brezhnev? What kind of bogus Western industrial democracy still has penal colonies???

Vache Folle|3.23.05 @ 1:55PM|#

Cathy Young wrote:

"It is also a demonstration of the dangers of hate speech laws, of criminalizing expression that offends people's sensibilities, and of equating criticism of religion with bigotry."

This point wants elaboration. Charges of bigotry abound in cases of criticism of religion and other discussions, and it is difficult to know what counts as bigotry. Is it bigotry to condemn the believer and not bigotry to criticize the belief?

Stormy Dragon|3.23.05 @ 4:11PM|#

In Soviet Union, art funds you!

|3.23.05 @ 5:09PM|#

Russia can hardly be called a Western Democracy. Putin seems to view the current regime in China as the ideal: capitalism with an authoritarian face.

|3.23.05 @ 7:42PM|#

An interesting piece from Cathy with well-taken advice in the last paragraph.

Vache Folle:

Is it bigotry to condemn the believer and not bigotry to criticize the belief?

It's certainly not wrong to criticize the believer for his/her beliefs. It may or may not be fair to make inferences about the believer, based on the beliefs, depending on the inferences. The fairness of some inferences may be debatable.

An important point is that real bigotry be condemned, and the most important point is that bigotry should never be criminalized.