One reader, commenting on my Berlusconi post, defends Larry Flynt’s attacks on Jerry Falwell (something I’ve written on before).
Note: Flynt attacked Rev. Jerry Falwell with a satire in print of the pastor having sex with his mother. Falwell sued Flynt and lost.
I decide to debate the assertions he made in his comment, point-by-point in this post, because they misuse language in ways that are quite common these days.
COMMENT: “I found Flynt’s raunchy satire of Falwell to be very funny and appropriate, although I can understand if others might have different opinions…..”
RAJIVA: Funny? Sexually and publicly humiliating someone in terms that rubbishes the most sensitive areas of their life – their family, their mother, their childhood affections, their sexuality, their religious beliefs, the public’s perception of their work as a minister, their capacity to perform professionally (counseling young people on sexuality or faith or family) – is “very funny,” and “appropriate”?
Actually, it’s considered torture (when done in the military), domestic abuse (when done in the family), and sexual harassment (when done in the work-place).
But it seems as though, if it’s printed, then suddenly it goes scot-free, it gets tagged “free speech.”
Well, some speech is not speech. It’s effectively action. And it should be treated as action.
Libel is a tort.
COMMENT: “He wasn’t attacking Falwell directly, so much as his absurd pompous messianic holier-than-thou persona and the oppressive and xenophobic underpinnings of his beliefs — the very same oppressive and xenophobic culture that was trying to silence and sue him.”
RAJIVA: You’re doing a lot of name-calling.
I disagree with Falwell’s fundamentalism. I never found him to be “holier than thou”. He was genuinely affable, as far as I could tell. Your opinion that someone else is personally xenophobic and oppressive doesn’t equate to their actually being those things, unless you show some evidence of injury, as I did in my previous response. Whatever Falwell said, he said quite courteously and even affectionately, when he spoke to Flynt. I saw them on TV (after the lawsuit, I believe).
COMMENT: The two had completely and violently opposing views on almost everything — I don’t see how anyone can be “cheerful” and “tolerant” and “reasonable” with someone who so thoroughly undermines one’s values.
RAJIVA: The essence of civilization and civility is to be tolerant of views that undermine your own. I have good friends who are evangelical Christians and devout Catholics. Many of them probably hope I will leave off my “heretical” views. It doesn’t bother me at all. And likewise, they aren’t bothered by my questioning of their dogmas. Ideology is only a dimension of personality…
COMMENT: Moreover, Falwell was not cheerful nor tolerant nor reasonable — he brutally tried to sue Flynt for $45M because of this insignificant work of fiction printed in his own private subscription-based magazine,
RAJIVA: You’re worried about the “brutality” of suing a man who made a huge fortune out of overtly misogynistic imagery of female sexuality (this is Hustler, not Playboy)….That’s a twist. Why should you “tolerate” any injury done to you? Do you tolerate muggers and bank robbers or financial criminals? Why should you tolerate vicious slanders in the media? Being civil in debate doesn’t mean you have to give up your legal rights, I hope.
The image was very damaging to Falwell and to his memories of his mother. It was degrading. How do you cap the monetary damages on that? Personally, I don’t think monetary damages alone are suitable for all torts. I think Flynt needed to have some small taste of what he himself had inflicted.
And it’s interesting that he ultimately did. His daughter accused him of incest, didn’t she?
Karma?
What’s more, it turned out, he was the incestuous one. Cheap psychoanalysis isn’t very useful usually, but in this case, it does seem that some compulsion made Flynt deride Falwell for exactly what he (not Falwell) was guilty of.
Shades of all those CEOs and political bosses who harass their female employees…. and then protect themselves by turning around and preemptively accusing disaffected employees of “stalking”… or in other ways undermining their professional claims. I’m talking about the sainted Bill Clinton, beloved of liberal feminists….and of a few other people……
I’m sure this satisfaction with punishment won’t sit well with those who see religious and spiritual values as all “milque-toast” and “mildness.” –
To me, that’s a sign of the decay in our sensibilities and the loss of the noble and chivalric value of honor, which is now confined to the Muslim world, or so it seems.
COMMENT: “Not to mention the far more insidious repressive venom he would spew to his students (all his draconian Religious anti-sexuality stuff, and twisted anti-free-speech poison).
RAJIVA: Did Falwell libel anyone when he was expressing his views? No. Then, those are precisely the views the first amendment is for, not for nasty, libelous attacks.
Also, disliking Hustler-type imagery and language don’t make you anti-sex or repressed, unless your idea of sex is not much more than what boys scrawl on bathroom walls. People can be quite sexual, and not want their sex lives displayed like graffiti.
Or can’t anyone tell the difference any longer? Throwing around the word “prudish” at anyone who doesn’t agree with your own level of tolerance for public coarseness is a misuse of the word.
COMMENT: I’m still not sure how the two managed to become friends later in life. (Also, unless there is more credible evidence — why doesn’t Tanya take a polygraph like her dad did? she already wrote a book about it — one can’t simply assume such character-assassinating crimes :b.))
RAJIVA: Again, most of your argument is personal bile, ad hominem, and assumption.
Jerry Falwell got on with Flynt at the end because, like him or not, Falwell took his religious beliefs seriously, and really did feel he could “hate the sin and love the sinner.” That may not sit well with the left, but my opinion of him has nothing to do with his political views or his dogmas – none of which I share. My opinion of him is based on my perception that whatever he was otherwise, as a public person, he presented himself genially, affably, and reasonably (
[Correction: I should add the phrase ‘when speaking to other people.’ It is true that Falwell used harsh language about groups of people, but that was language based on evangelical and fundamentalist criteria that he held about their behavior. This was the argument I made in a piece called, “God’s Son, Falwell’s Mother, and the Rest of Us Ho’s”].
He did not deserve the filth slur thrown at him by Flynt, he was a better man than Flynt
(Correction: I should add the phrase – ‘in this respect’), and Flynt recognized it at some level….
Update: The fact that through most of history both secular and religious thinkers have regarded homosexual behavior as morally wrong can provide some rational justification for differentiating between Falwell’s attacks on homosexual behavior ( in language like “part of a Satanic system”) and any other random personal attack on another human being. There is a distinction that can be made between those two types of attacks.
Camille Paglia makes this point in an essay she wrote about a Martha Nussbaum critique that I’ll try to link here…
Note: I am a firm supporter of gay marriage.