South Park
Remember when the Islamic world was throwing a carefully orchestrated, manipulative, hypocritical fit over those Mohammed cartoons? I wrote then that if Islam wanted to be seen as an all-grown-up-now world religion it would have to learn to put up with being mocked, and that freedom of speech included the freedom to blaspheme—indeed, as those bomb-throwing radicals at the The Economist pointed out…
Freedom of expression, including the freedom to poke fun at religion , is not just a hard-won human right but the defining freedom of liberal societies.
Today it’s Tom Cruise and his touchy, litigious fellow Scientologists who need to grow the fuck up. The creators of South Park produced an episode that made fun of Tom Cruise—Tom hid in Stan’s closet and refused to come out—and the thoroughly ridiculous things that Scientologists believe. Scientologists are free to believe whatever ridiculous crap they want, of course, just as Catholics are free to believe that those wafers turn into the body of Christ, and Mormons are free believe that Joseph Smith wasn’t a fraud, a liar and a sociopath. And other people—religious, non-religious—have a concurrent right to think their religious beliefs, which can not be proved or disproved, are utterly absurd, and a right to say so.
Cruise seems to have successfully prevented the “Trapped in the Closet” South Park episode from being shown in the United Kingdom, and last week he is alleged to have badgered Paramount into yanking a scheduled repeat of that South Park episode.
Paramount may have caved, but not the guys behind South Park.
“So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun!” the “South Park” creators said in a statement Friday in Daily Variety. “Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies… You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail!”
Dan Savage and The Stranger telling others to grow up?
Pot, kettle.