Je Suis Charlie

You know, even though I will defend to the death the right for the Charlie Hebdo-type comic images to exist, and support what they do as free speech, I have to say that a lot of what I see in that genre repels me, personally. It doesn't OFFEND me...it just makes me a wee bit queasy. I am not offended by images of gay couples kissing (actually, I find those kind of sweet) but I don't want to see pictures of ANYONE'S private sex life or dripping genitals. And pictures of rape of any sort totally appall me. That's why I have a line I won't cross in what I post. Sue me. Je suis Charlie to a point. Like them, I also want my right to pick and choose what I say, post and endorse.

To me, what CH has published isn't blasphemy. To find something blasphemic, one would have to believe and I don't. No, I find it VULGAR. Some of the images around the web depicting the generally accepted image of the possible "Christ" figure being raped or indulging in sex, gay or straight, I find vulgar, too and I am not a friend of fundamentalist religion of any sort.  Those pictures are sophmorically vulgar, actually. Like religion, porn should be private and personal, as well and not forced on the general population. And, like any idea, religion is not exempt from satire or criticism.

Now that aversion to vulgarity could be my southern belle upbringing or old tapes in my head but I don't think so. I think it has to do with respecting the dignity of all humans. I don't find it disrespectful to the religion so much as disrespectful of the viewer and society in general. Having said that, I will never tell anyone what they can post on THEIR timeline and what kind of comedy they should enjoy.

I look at a lot of those images as they pass my way and see a lot of anger beneath the vulgarity. I think I can understand that. I am angry at our own American Taliban, the far-right, Dominionist, fundamentalist christians who want to impose their interpretation of old, scattered, bronze-age texts that have been re-vamped and poorly translated on this nation as law..a kind of law that would set us back, socially, over 100 years. The bible, as we know it now, is a product of the people from a time when supernatural explanations were all they had. No one really knows who wrote what and as a book of history, it sucks.

You see, there is something else I find even more vulgar. I think hate is much uglier than any kind of pornographic image. The ones who want to impose their religion on the rest of the human race talk a good talk about a god of love and peace, but the things they do, in the name of that god, are anything but loving and peaceful. And tolerance and acceptance of differences in people and cultures is off their board, entirely.

No religious belief gives anyone the right to murder, terrorize or try to enforce a type of lifestyle or laws on others. When the terrorists, foreign and domestic, take lives or try to intimidate and control and say they are doing the will of some unseen, unproven deity, then I have to call them on their bullshit. If you don't think that we have American Terrorists that are a product of fundamentalist christian religion one has only to look at the KKK, the killers of doctors providing reproductive health services to women, any number of "militias"...oh they are not overtly visible and are just emerging from the shadows, but they are bent on world domination, just as avidly and fanatically as the followers of fundamentalist Islam.

That is why, as icky as I find some of the products of Charlie Hebdo and others like them, I am with those hundreds of thousands of sane, civilized French citizens who marched against the horrific act that was more pornographic than any pictures of Islamic genitalia. That is why I can say, "Je suis Charlie."

Besides, I'd rather be Charlie than be like this bunch. Now THIS is offending me.