Advogato: Blog for etbe

24 Apr 2008 etbe » (Master)

Offensive Blog Posts

There has been ongoing debate in the Debian community for a number of years about what standards of behavior should be expected. Matthew Garrett sets a new low by making a joke about Jesus being molested as a child [1]. While I believe that debate and discussion about religion is a good thing, such comments about someone who is widely regarded as a God (part of the Holy Trinity) seems to provide no value and just needlessly offends people. I used to be a Christian, and while I have great disagreements with most Christians about issues of religion I still believe that Jesus (as described in the bible) was a good person and deserves some respect. I don’t believe that blasphemy should be illegal, but some minimum standards should be observed when discussing religion.

Next there is the issue of child molesting, most people agree that there’s nothing amusing in that - so I hope that nothing more needs to be said about violating babies.

Finally there is the issue of rape in general often being treated as a joke in the computer industry (I am not sure how prevalent this is in the wider community). One example that is from a Wired article: “We were raped by Microsoft. Bill Gates did it personally. Introducing Gates to the president of a small company is like introducing Mike Tyson to a virgin” [2]. I admit that finding examples of this on the web is not easy, part of it is due to such slang use being more common in spoken communication than in written communication, another is the vast number of slang terms that are used.

A Google search for “male rape” [3] turns up some informative articles. One FAQ suggests that 3% of men will be raped as an adult [4] - I expect that some guys will decide that it’s not so funny when they realise that it could happen to them.

For people who’s knowledge of the English language is not as good as that of Matthew and I, here is the dictionary definition of the word “violated” [5].