Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Miss Poubelle followed with dismay the recent controversy at the Brooklyn Museum of Art over the exhibition Sensation, which contained Chris Ofili's portrait of the Virgin Mary decorated with porno cutouts and elephant dung. In a manner that has now become entirely predictable, William Donohue of the Catholic League of America described the show as "Catholic-bashing".

In using the word this way, Donohue has joined the increasing number of people who abuse the word bashing. To bash, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is "to strike with a heavy blow that tends to beat or smash in the surface struck." Unless the painting possessed magical properties, no Catholics were actually bashed by Ofili's painting. Offended? Yes, but bashing is beating. It's not offending. Matthew Shepard was bashed by his assailants in Wyoming. No one can be bashed by a painting.

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This misuse of bash is a fairly recent innovation in American English. Miss Poubelle couldn't find any instances of bash being used to mean "offend, criticize" prior to about 1990. The word bashing is familiar to the gay and lesbian community in the form of fag-bashing, a striking referral to physical attacks on people because of their sexuality. She regrets to say that it may have been our own community who first began to dilute the word of this power. During the 1986 March on Washington, Miss Poubelle recalls hearing people call Ronald Reagan "a fag-basher" and "a murderer." Neither of these things were literally true. Reagan was a wicked, stupid, and selfish man who didn't give a damn about us. His government's delay in addressing the AIDS crisis cost thousands of lives. And he promoted an atmosphere of hostility in the country that was a positive encouragement to attacks on gays and lesbians. But Reagan was not a murderer or a fag-basher. He didn't personally kill or beat any gay people.

The difference is important. Fag-bashing is against the law-- it's what we call assault and battery. Hateful language directed at lesbian and gay people isn't against the law, however morally reprehensible it may be and whatever nasty consequences it may lead to. Nor should it be. If we want a society where we are free to express ourselves in whatever way we like, we have to pay the price of permitting public homophobia. We don't have to be silent in the face of it-- we can protest, scream, criticize, write letters, vote, or boycott, but we mustn't seek to make hate speech illegal.

What is dangerous about the dilution of the word bashing is that it equates criminal assault with mere offense. This creates the danger that our very real concerns about physical safety will be equated in the public forum with a hypersensitive inability to take criticism. Miss Poubelle can easily imagine voters and politicians who will think that fag-bashing is no big deal if bashing means nothing worse than verbal abuse.

As a community, we have to remember we have more to lose than anyone else if free-speech rights are eroded. We have to resist any versions of campus speech codes or hate-crimes legislation that would penalize people for voicing their opinions, however homophobic or misguided they may be. Because once that door is open, the majority will inevitably find ways to interpret the law that will victimize us. Not so long ago, you would not have been able to read this magazine because it would have been considered obscene. Can we doubt that the religious right would accuse us of anti-religious bias as a new way of suppressing our voices? When we talk about our issues in a public forum, we have to make it clear that we seek protection from physical violence and not merely from speech that offends us. **