Machan's Musings - Defending Larry Flynt & the Danish Cartoons
by Tibor R. Machan
Maybe you have forgotten, but there’s a guy in America, named Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler’s, who was lionized in The People v. Larry Flynt, a 1996 movie, despite publishing one of the filthiest, nastiest, and slickest magazines on earth. Why? Because he wouldn’t give in to censors and kept defending his right to published whatever he wanted to.
I haven’t heard this man’s name brought up in connection with the furor over the Danish cartoons although the case is absolutely germane. Flynt’s magazine is such an insult to women that some of them, including University of Michigan Law Professor Catherine MacKinnon have actually argued that it violates women’s civil rights. Many conservatives, such as Irving Kristol, the godfather of Neo-Conservatism, have agreed. But good modern liberals, including the famous NYU and Oxford University Professor Ronald Dworkin, have defended Flint’s right to published Hustler’s.
What’s more, they are right. McKinnon and her Neo-Conservative allies are wrong. They are wrong for the same reason that all those Muslims who have gone on a rampage against the Danes are wrong: What one writes, publishes, and sells to people is one’s own business, and it is the business of those who buy it whether they will do so. Even if they should not, it is still their business and no one else’s whether they will do so.
This is the thing so many who are reporting on this furor do not seem to get. And that is very sad because the reporters are among those who most directly need to understand what’s at issue. Whether or not a newspaper, magazine or publishing house puts out material that’s decent, respectful of what others value, etc., they have every right to go ahead and publish whatever they choose. It makes absolutely no difference whether they should put out the stuff. That’s a moral issue, one of professional ethics—in journalism, non-fiction writing, editing, and so forth. The content of these forums may, of course, be criticized. They may be boycotted, ostracized, and even strongly but always peacefully protested.But they may not be forcibly shut down, banned, or officially censored.
The modern Roman Catholic Church has had its list of publications and movies that the faithful are supposed to avoid. But it hasn’t, unlike some Muslim governments, put out a contract on the lives of those who produce the materials included on this list. Salman Rushdie, the author of the novel Satanic Verses, which had material in it that offended Muslims, was targeted with such a contract and throughout the Western World and elsewhere voices were raised in his defense—not in defense of what he wrote but of his right to write whatever he wanted to write.
So, why is there such confusion afoot now about the publication of the cartoons by the Danish newspapers? Why not see the matter clearly—whatever the content, the papers have the right to publish it and this should be acknowledge everywhere, in any legal system. The failure to do so must be understood as a fundamental afront to the tenets of civilized life. To physically attack those with whose ideas one disagrees is barbaric, however much the ideas are themselves an insult to what is regarded to be sacred by those do mount the attack.
As I have argued in a previous column, one reason this is not made so clear today by many Western intellectuals is that they have lost sight of the fundamental nature of the principles of free expression. Many now see these principles to apply only in the West, and only where people happen to embrace them. In short, they are not longer viewed as basic principles at all but as rules of thumb.
But that theory is just false. It is evident that it’s false when one realizes that it’s based on a different but allegedly equally broad, even universal principle, namely, cultural tolerance. The idea is that no matter how much violence is done to people with different ideas, if some cultures want to do such violence, well, they have the right to do it.
This is wrong. But it is also a contradiction to the idea that principles hold only for certain places, at certain times. It is itself put forth as a principle that holds everywhere. But if it could be such a principle, then so can the principle of freedom of expression. And the latter, rather than the former, does, indeed, hold. That is exactly why it is part of the US Constitution, in the First Amendment. And it is why it's also worth widespread and clearly articulated support.
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