The filth and the fury

OPINION: The problem with defending free speech is that if you go to bat for the dead and heroic cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, you also have to defend Hollywood's right to make jokes about killing the leader of North Korea and a daft heavy metal band's right to insult a chunk of the public simply because they feel like it.

It was apt that the story about the Canterbury Museum's display of an offensive anti-Christian T-shirt broke on Black Friday. On February 13, the world learned that among the hundreds of collectable shirts in the T-Shirts Unfolding show, there was an infamous one produced by UK band Cradle of Filth in the 1990s.

On the front of the black shirt, there is a picture of a sexualised nun. On the back, in large white letters, the slogan "Jesus is a c...".

The T-shirt was ruled objectionable in 2008 by the Office of Film and Literature Classification which said that it degraded and demeaned women and represented Christians as "inherently inferior to other members of the public". It crossed the censorship threshold and was "injurious to the public good".

If you own one, you risk up to five years in jail. An Invercargill retailer was fined $500 in 2012 for owning eight, which were then destroyed.

The shirt is not just a problem in New Zealand. There have been several convictions in the UK, with one man pleading guilty to the arcane crime of religiously aggravated offensive conduct. The judge in that case told the 35-year-old to "grow up".

Even Cradle of Filth's drummer was charged with creating a public disorder after being caught in his band's shirt. But you expect that kind of tomfoolery from an attention-seeking metal act. What about a responsible institution like the Canterbury Museum?

"We bent over backwards to follow the letter of the law," says Canterbury Museum director Anthony Wright.

We met in his office on Wednesday morning. There had been an incident at the museum just the day before when a woman got past a guard and into the small booth where the T-shirt is displayed in a perspex case. She produced a can of paint and began spraying the case black. The paint was cleaned off and the matter is now with the police, Wright says.

There is a strong element of deja vu about all this. The display case containing Tania Kovats' Virgin in a Condom, which featured a condom on a statue of the Virgin Mary, was attacked in 1998 when it was in a show of contemporary British art at Te Papa.

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The filth and the fury