The story when it came to me via Facebook amused me no end. Down in Amarillo, Texas, a local Protestant fundamentalist preacher announced that he would burn a Qu'ran at the local Sam Houston Park.
The local Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Amarillo mobilized an interfaith body to protest the Qu'ran burning. When the pastor put the gasoline-soaked book on the BBQ grill, the protestors put their hands on the grill.
During the vigorous clash of opinions that followed, a skateboarder whizzed up behind the pastor and grabbed the Qu'ran and sped off with it. He later presented it to the local Imam.
I linked the story on the church's Facebook page.
A conscientious member of the congregation raised the question as to whether the pastor's rights to free speech and free expression had been violated by the skateboarder. A very good question that got me to thinking. No conclusions yet, just a lot of thinking.
Somewhere else during these last couple of weeks, I read a short comment somewhere reminding us of the great controversy over flag-burning. Had the Right and the Left switched positions on deliberately offensive acts of symbolic protest?
There are some similarities and some differences between flag and Qu'ran burning.
Both are deliberately offensive acts, not words, but acts that are theatrical and symbolic. Presumedly, the destroyed object is the private property of the person destroying it. Certainly I would have the right to burn my own baseball cards of Papelbon, Pedroia and Youkilis in protest of the performance of the Red Sox, no matter how offensive that would be to others.
But whatever the ownership of the actual object being destroyed, who owns the symbol? For an American to burn the American flag is different than someone else burning that flag, isn't it? It's an expression of how alienated one of "us" is from the rest of "us". It may be shocking, but perhaps the rest of us need to hear it.
But for a militantly Christian pastor to burn the Holy Book of the Muslims? And to do so, in a community which is overwhelmingly Christian. I wonder if it is in the interests of a free society for the people to allow others to try to mobilize the empowered majority against an unwelcome minority. The relative power of communities does matter.
On the other hand, such acts are political theatre, and therefore, practically harmless. There is a world of difference between burning an individual copy of the Qu'ran in a park, and the State confiscating Qu'rans and burning them in bonfires on the street. So why not just let the theatrical act play itself out: perhaps on the theory that people should have the right to complete their acts of political theatre. Did protestors to the burning restrict the pastor's rights when they laid hands on the grill and dared him to burn people as well as books?
Everything is theatre now. YouTube and the Internet mean that any action can be enacted on a global stage
If it is just theatre, why not let the audience play a role as well? To propose to symbolically burn a Qu'ran is to invite someone to try to symbolically rescue it. Would it be a restriction of the rights of a flag-burner to douse the flames with a fire-extinguisher? Would it make a difference if it was a private citizen, or a city-owned firehose?
Think that most religious liberals would agree that laws against Qu'ran or flag burning would violate the rights of free expression. And most of the people who oppose the Islamic Center in lower Manhattan would concede that a law requiring mosques to meet stricter legal standards would be wrong. So, in the end, these questions come down to matter of ethical behavior among the free citizens of this very multi-cultural, contentious society of spectacle. What role in the theatre of scandalous acts will we play?
See you Sunday.
Tom
*Adrienne Rich, "Origins" Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995, New York, W. W. Norton & Company.
The unabridged stanza reads:
Turning Points. We all like to hear about those. Points
on a graph.
Sudden conversions. Historical swings. Some kind of
dramatic structure.
But a life doesn't unfold that way it moves
in loops by switchbacks loosely strung
around the swelling of one hillside toward another
(there's more.)
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