Curb your hypocrisy

I'm still trying to figure out what conservatives expect from Larry David. The star of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm is about as liberal as you can get, doesn't hide his disdain for conservatives and Republicans, and routinely mocks Christians, Jews, and organized religion in general. On the show he has eaten Jesus and Mary and gotten into a fistfight with Joseph, interrupted a Christian Science prayer circle with his Hava Nagila ringtone, exhumed his mother's body because she was put in the wrong section of a Jewish cemetery, and pretended to speak Hebrew in order to ingratiate himself to an orthodox Jew. Most recently, he accidentally urinated on a picture of Jesus, prompting its owners to believe that the picture had miraculously started crying.

This latest bit of blasphemy has sent NewsBusters into fits of outrage, calling the scene "disgraceful," and reprinting an angry statement from Catholic League president Bill Donohue, as well as an e-mail from a BigHollywood.com reader who wrote that "the hypocrisy is that Mr. David would never exhibit such gross contempt for any other religion, especially Islam." That, of course, is not true - Larry once attempted to set his blind friend up with an ugly Muslim woman whose unsightly features were hidden by her burqa.

But there's a larger point to be made. In the past, NewsBusters has stood behind mockery of religious figures as expressions of free speech. When a Swedish paper printed cartoons depicting Mohammed's head on a dog's body, NewsBusters attacked the "manufactured outrage in the Islamic world" and praised the paper for writing "an excellent editorial defending free speech, especially the freedom to parody." They later returned to the issue, writing: "Islamic radicals continue to spread irrational hate against the Swedish Mohammed dog sketches."

Is NewsBusters' outrage at Larry David any more legitimate? Does he not enjoy the same right to parody?

When you defend mockery of one religious figure as free speech and then roundly condemn mockery of another, that's not outrage, that's hypocritical bigotry.