In defense of blasphemy

Violence should not be condoned. Yet there are acts of violence that are forgivable, such as when the brutality is done as a result of moral indignation, particularly when a movable wooden cock is placed on the same wall as Jesus Christ and a pouty-lipped Marilyn Monroe.

These were not only the sentiments of the hysterical lynch mob that went on a holy crusade against one Mideo Cruz. The statement, and the underlying approval of violence in the name of faith, was published in an Aug. 8 editorial in this paper titled “Art as terrorism,” denouncing an installation exhibited in the Cultural Center of the Philippines for what the writer called an attack on religion.

“The vandalism inflicted on Mideo M. Cruz’s ‘Poleteismo’ art work at the Cultural Center of the Philippines last Aug. 4—an unidentified couple smashed a penis-motif wooden ashtray glued onto the poster, and tried but failed to set fire to the collage that formed part of the installation—is understandable.” The editorial went on to say, “if all of this does not constitute sacrilege, blasphemy or attack on religion, we don’t know what is.”

What is understandable was the reaction of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, whose campaign against condom advertising, sex education and the public right to know makes Cruz the poster child for original sin. “Poleteismo” is “the product of a troubled mind,” says Commission on Human Rights Chair Etta Rosales, whose sudden mastery of pop psychology has neglected the fact many of the communists and journalists killed under her watch were also silenced for speaking sacrilege against their killers. The guardians of morality are now a motley crew that includes the son of one of the country’s most cherished sex symbols, a former military chief whose martial law regime was a time of lies and terror, and a television host who was accused by an underaged starlet named Pepsi Paloma of coercing her to drop a rape case against several of his comedy co-hosts. Paloma committed suicide in 1985. Tito Sotto is now a senator of the republic.

The CCP closed the entire “Kulo” exhibit, citing death threats and fear of reprisal in its statement. A case has been filed before the Office of the Ombudsman against the officials of the CCP and Cruz, who defends himself by saying his work is not blasphemous so much as a questioning of the Filipino culture of idolatry. There are those who claim the work is blasphemous, and there is reason to believe it is. “The exhibit features images of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary adorned with objects not related to Christianity,” says the CBCP. “One even showed a crucifix with a condom. One Christ the King figurine had rabbit ears.”

There are limits to free speech, they say. Lost in the howling and shrieking is the fact that blasphemy is still free speech, and that every act of worship of any non-Catholic of any God other than the Vatican-approved God the Father can be construed as blasphemous, and so with the condemnation of thousands of cases of pedophilia spawned by generations of unpunished Catholic priests.

The freedom of religion, not only the freedom of expression, is on Cruz’s side here. He is not a believer, in the same vein as the women who stormed the CCP insisting that to be Catholic implies giving up independence of thought. His right to disbelieve, to doubt, to paint himself black and sing Alleluia backward is defended in the Constitution, no matter if his acts offend the gentlemen of the Church. The infidels during the reign of Richard the Lionheart were not shoving cocks into Jesus calendars when they were slaughtered with the blessing of Holy Mother Church, neither were the Salem witches singing to Satan before they were  burned at the stake. The threat of the existence of another religion has historically been enough to cause the same vicious frenzy that has spattered Cruz’s Facebook page with anonymous messages threatening hell and damnation. The only difference is that today there is a government and a Constitution built to protect people who disagree, troubled or not, from being crucified for rebellion at the instigation of a maddened mob.

This is what the moralists forget when they demand limits on free speech—that the right to free expression is not limited to speech that agrees with Imelda Marcos’ good and true and beautiful.

The issue is not good art or bad art or what the Inquirer editorial dismisses as “unoriginal art.” The issue is freedom. When the Church stamped its indignant foot, the floor cracked under the country’s bastion of free expression. If Jeffrey Jeturian’s film gets X-rated for political content, and another coiffed matron censors Brillante Mendoza for a film about poverty “that might make other people think we are a poor country,” there will be no theater that will open its doors the way the CCP did in 2010. It is why it is the greatest misrepresentation to claim that the CCP as a government body funded by taxpayer’s money should put itself at the mercy of the majority. Now there is a new definition being carved out when it comes to acceptable art—as if acceptability has ever been the intent of artists. Now they must be sensitive and politically correct, now they must concede to the power of the Holy Trinity, now they must create art according to the odd workings of the mind of a woman named Jo Imbong.

Mideo Cruz questioned Catholicism, as Rizal and many thousands of artists have done, the way Mother Teresa did in her diaries published after her death. Perhaps this is what the CBCP fears. What sort of faith is it when the Church considers a wooden penis sticking out of a secondhand ashtray a threat to its spirituality? And what kind of moralists are these who go out of their way to view an out-of-the-way exhibit in order to be offended? Perhaps it would be better for their souls if they were more offended at the violence done not to wooden statues on gallery pedestals, but to the bodies of the massacred and tortured and starving, who are after all temples of the Holy Spirit.

The CCP, more than any other institution of art, is compelled by virtue of its affiliation to a secular and democratic government to protect the universality of freedom, and not just the freedoms the CBCP permits. The closure of the exhibit is a government-sanctioned assault on every minority’s freedom of religion, or lack of it, both of which the Constitution protects. So when a national newspaper whose watchword is freedom applauds a mob’s violent attack because the artist “misrepresents Catholic iconography in order to suit his self-serving and ultimately erroneous thesis,” and the President, whose mother once proudly announced she leads a free nation, calls for censorship, it is an attack on every individual’s freedom of religion and expression, and a test of whether this nation understands its God is the people.