On Point: WWRMND?

Friday, February 10, 2006

The question before the house, ladies and gentlemen, is would we do it to Jesus, too?

Would this editorial page publish a cartoon mocking Jesus just as we reprinted one of the infamous Danish cartoons featuring Muhammad?

The query surfaced in a column by a News colleague, but his curiosity was hardly unique. Several e-mail writers and a couple of callers also wondered whether we were equal-opportunity offenders of religious feelings, or opportunists with an ax to grind against Islam.

It's a fair question, but the answer is not hard to unpack. Of course we'd publish a cartoon mocking Jesus if it had provoked an international furor involving riots, murders, the torching of embassies, and a mass movement to intimidate the free Western press. We'd publish it not because we'd relish offending Christians - quite the contrary - but because the cartoon would be news, and the best way to present news is with context and detail.

It's not possible to search this paper's archives to see if we've ever published a cartoon featuring Jesus, although I suspect we have. Other papers most certainly have. But we've unquestionably published cartoons depicting the pope, bishops, priests, nuns, evangelical church leaders and the "religious right" in unflattering - and sometimes nasty - terms.

American cartoonists have been dishing up the most repellent images of religious leaders at least since the bigoted genius Thomas Nast portrayed Catholic bishops as crocodiles in his 19th century classic The American River Ganges.

What puzzles me is not whether the News would publish a cartoon of Jesus, but why on earth so many U.S. newspapers have refused to show their readers at least one of the Danish cartoons with Muhammad.

Bill Donohue, the truculent head of the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights (who has, by the way, denounced publication of the Muhammad cartoons) believes the answer to the U.S. news media's reluctance is simple: They are afraid. They claim they're being sensitive to religious feelings, he acidly notes, when that has never stopped them from publishing the most inflammatory material regarding Christians.

Donohue is no doubt right in a few instances - the Boston Phoenix actually admitted its cowardice in a pathetic editorial - but I believe something more insidious is primarily at work. Editors know that Christians and Jews can take a bit of roughing up but suspect that Muslims can't. By refusing to reproduce a Danish cartoon, those editors are patronizing a portion of their readers with the message that they're not ready to be treated like everyone else.

Here at the News, we're just not that comfortable wearing kid gloves.

Don't let male students skate

Boys are turning away from school. Girls dominate the academic honors almost everywhere and are approaching 60 percent of students in higher education. Schools need to reconnect with males. They should do this by allowing boys to devote writing assignments on famous Americans to skateboarding champions.

Every sentence in that previous paragraph is true except - well, you know which one. Trying to entice boys into academics by gutting meaningful content is a contradiction in terms. And yet a recent News story on a Boulder elementary school dedicated to boosting boys' achievement featured a youngster who wrote on skateboarder Tony Hawk.

Good schools can make mistakes, so maybe this example isn't a meaningful reflection of what goes on at that school. But surely there are plenty of significant figures in American history whose exploits are at least as thrilling as Hawk's, and who actually contributed something to our society worth remembering, too.

Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes On Point several times a week. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.