The BFD | “Catholics Are Right about Birth Control”

There was a piece of spray-painted graffiti I used to pass by regularly in Wellington, in the car park of a building on Tory St. It was a play on the words of French Enlightenment thinker Denis Diderot and proclaimed “We will never be free until the last politician is hung with the intestines of the last policeman”. It was equal parts comic, thought-provoking, ridiculous and common-or-garden vandalism. Diderot had actually said “hands would weave the entrails of the priest, For the lack of a cord with which to strangle kings” in a poem about the innate freedoms of humankind and those whom he perceived would restrict them.

Whether the graffiti made you smile or frown, you couldn’t call it ‘hate speech’, just the work of somebody appropriating the property of others to publicly display their imagined cleverness. And so it was that outside a Christchurch mosque the message “Islam is Right about Women” was chalked upon the footpath sometime Saturday last. It was a fairly lame, tame piece of graffiti, not exactly swastikas spray-painted on synagogues calibre offence-provoking, and not original; the phrase a product of 4-chan pranksters who specialise in needling left-wing liberals, hoping to skewer smug diversity. So: why is it being treated as ‘hate speech’?

And why is District Commander Superintendent John Price saying “Police are taking this matter extremely seriously, as we do all reports of hate speech or behaviour that causes concern to our communities.” It’s not awful, it’s innocuous, especially when compared to the (very) vile phrases found defacing Gisborne’s St Mary’s Star of the Sea church in March last year, very hateful messages, rich in profanity and racism both, which were never referred to in such terms but as vandalism, mere graffiti?

I suspect the phrase is referred to as ‘hate speech’ for exactly the reason it was coined, to provoke ‘a conversation’ luvvies simply don’t want to have.

The relatively sober Pew Research Centre’s extensive study ‘The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society’ did indeed find very strong relationships between advocates of sharia and (what the west would consider) subjugation of women’s rights; the requirement to obey a husband, lack of divorce and inheritance rights and relatively second-class citizenship.

“Islam is right about women’ is no more offensive than ‘Catholics are right about birth-control’ and equally juvenile, but which latter statement, if chalked outside a church, would hardly raise a policeman’s eyebrow. So please; District Commander Superintendent, keep your perspective, even if all around you others are losing theirs.