Freedom cannot long survive perpetual, chronic, and largely bogus outrage.
The main threat of censorship comes nowadays not from governments, but from an alliance, or at least a synergy, of pressure groups and unscrupulous and pusillanimous corporations.
A handsomely produced magazine, The European Conservative, for which I occasionally write a literary essay, was once displayed on the racks of the largest distributor of magazines in Great Britain, W.H. Smith, which has now withdrawn it from the racks, and refused to sell it in the future. It was intimidated into doing so by two homosexuals who objected to a cartoon in its current issue.
In the cartoon, a mother is shown asking her young son how school was today. The boy vomits: and his vomitus is depicted as a rainbow, the symbol of what we are now supposed to call the ‘homosexual community’ (a community being a population of people who share any characteristic whatsoever).
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
This piece originally appeared in Law & Liberty