Don’t read this if you are an offended minority
July 28th, 2009 by Ajay
Dog lovers united to have a B.C. comic strip taken down from GoComics.com because it “encouraged violence against animals” and just plain offended people. That’s quite a stretch, considering the strip contained no violence. It features the main character of the patently banal strip reading a book. If the strip encouraged anything, I would think it to be literacy. Especially if you don’t read English and attemped to infer meaning by pictures alone. I guess this strip encourages dog violence as well? Let’s blame everything on some form of media because I wasn’t brought up to tell right from wrong.
John Hart Studios then apologized for it. For creating something that made a vocal few unhappy. There goes the glorious vision of standing behind your art. I’m sure it was gone long ago, actually. This is just another nail in the coffin. I hope the apology consoled those who complained about it. They will probably mark it as a “win” for themselves and forget about it the next time David Letterman makes a joke that offends Sarah Palin.
Someone seems to have borrowed my copy of Fahrenheit 451, but I do remember that the keystone of the censorship in that world being the vocal minority. Many vocal minorities of all sorts complaining about being offended. Anything that angered dog lovers and cat lovers was taken out of schools and off of bookstore shelves. Those may be ridiculous examples, but I don’t have my copy here to reference. This is the path on the road to the end of independent thought. It is paved with the apologies and complaints of the knee-jerk masses.
