I think you still have to watch advertising to read articles on Salon if you're not a subscriber. But you might find it worth it to read this piece by political cartoonist Doug Marlette. He writes about the Danish cartoonist flap and death threats and things like that.
I was e-mailed by a reporter the other day who wanted me to answer the question, "How do you feel about cartoonists being threatened with death for drawing cartoons?" I don't think he understood my answer, which was that I'm opposed to human beings being threatened with death for anything they do, short of inflicting death or physical harm on another human being. It's not just cartooning that shouldn't result in death threats. Death threats are a bad thing in almost every situation except maybe cutting ahead of me in the checkout line at the market.
Anyway, the reporter thought I was unwilling to take a stand against censorship so I wrote a more formal statement of the obvious, about how it is inhuman for anyone to be harmed or punished for expressing an opinion, however offensive it may be to some. I actually think most people in the world believe that. Some just believe there are exceptions for certain things they hold dear.
You have to wonder what they're so afraid of. When I was attending U.C.L.A. many moons ago, there was a gentleman who showed up outside the Student Union every Friday around the lunch hour. He was an aspiring derelict who'd deliver a semi-coherent discourse about what was wrong with the world. I heard a little of it once and I couldn't figure out what the hell he was talking about…something about false prophets and bold men on horseback dressed in rags. This all led up to his big finish, which was always the burning of a Bible. He had a seemingly-endless supply of them and I don't recall if he told someone or if I imagined the reason, which was that he'd spent the previous twenty years as a travelling salesman. In every town, he said or I theorized, he'd swipe the volume the Gideons had placed in the top drawer of the bedside table and take it home for, I guess, possible future burning.
The Bible-burner was around for months, generally ignored. If he drew an audience at all, it was of students who wanted to laugh at his hysterical manner and wild-eyed fanaticism. But then someone took umbrage at the guy's finales and for a few weeks, there were petitions out and articles in the school newspaper about some proposal to ban the burning of sacred religious symbols or books or I don't know what the exact wording was. All I know is that it got the Bible-burner a lot of undeserved attention and that the folks who wanted to make him arrestible made even less sense than he did. One who harangued me to sign his petition seemed to have a genuine fear that the sacred tome was in some kind of actual jeopardy and had to be defended against one drunk with a Zippo lighter. I feel that way when people want to make it a crime to burn an American flag…or when it actually is a crime to deny the Holocaust.
In Austria, a British author was just sentenced to three years in prison for doing that. While one can understand why some countries are sensitive about the subject, I don't think the evidence of gas chambers at Auschwitz is so flimsy that it can't withstand a few people arguing against it. Using violence or imprisonment to stop an idea from being questioned or ridiculed is to demean the power of that idea. If something really is an eternal truth, it shouldn't matter if someone argues against it or draws an insulting cartoon about it or burns a copy of it. Instead, let's make it a crime, punishable by death, to mock or burn my work. That's the kind of stuff that needs protection.