What you seem to be interested in is expanding your freedoms at the cost of their freedoms. That’s simply not productive to you or your interests. What I’m hearing you say is that not only do you want them out of your sandbox but you want their icons in your sandbox without them having a say in what you do with their icons. They’re going to resent this appropriation of their icons and final result will be detrimental to your cause.

Publicly supporting everyone’s right to be left alone and respected strikes me as a much more productive way to promote our right to be left alone and respected.

Meanwhile, you’re saying that its bad to hurt the feelings of others without any regard whatsoever for whether it’s objectively reasonable for them to get their feelings hurt from the behavior in question. That strikes me as a bizarre claim.

And you can’t ignore the fact that there’s a culture war going on. Some religionists want to narrow the freedoms of popular culture, forcing it within the cultural constraints of their religion; some secularists (and I’m one) want religion to stay out of secular business (which Playboy magazine surely is). I know which side of that war I’m fighting on, and I’m quite confident that feelings are going to get hurt in the fighting. Always have, always will. As dedicated as I am to civility, even a civil debate can hurt feelings while being worth having.

I believe the pictorial to be disrespectful towards the people who hold those beliefs, and that disrespect comes from people who don’t care about the icon using it in a way that offends, for whatever reason, the people who do care about the icon.

If one child takes another child’s toys and abuses them, that’s disrespectful behavior towards the other child and a refusal to respect the child’s wishes.

Likewise, Mexican Playboy’s use of a religious icon they don’t care about for the purpose of making a buck was disrespectful to the people who do care, and care deeply about the icon.

There doesn’t need to be a religious logic for there to be disrespect. All there needs to be is someone not caring one bit about someone else is going to feel about this.

You can justify your lack of caring about their feelings a thousand different ways. You can tell me in a thousand different ways why they shouldn’t feel the way they do. In all of that you would be completely right.

But in the end, they’re still hurt, and I wonder if someone really needed to let them be hurt just to make a buck.

What’s really going on here, I think, is that there are cultural tendencies associated with, but not derived from, aspects of religious belief. And you, just like the people claiming to be offended, are confusing the tendencies with the associated belief.

In other words, a pretty nude dressed up in the religious iconography of a religion whose believers tend not to approve of nudity is being parsed (by Ken and others) as disrespectful of the religion. In fact, it leaves the religion untouched (as the hypothetical Hustler portrayal I mentioned would not) but it probably is a mild tweak at the sensibilities (non-religious, cultural sensibilities) of the believers in that religion. It also (perhaps rudely) invites them to take positions that highlight the disconnect between the actual tenets of their religion, and the cultural prejudices they like to defend, disingenuously, in the name of that religion.

Respecting the actual religious beliefs of others is a good thing, as is respecting their right to practice those beliefs in their own homes and churches. Respecting their attempts (which they themselves have termed “cultural war”) to shape and limit the culture they live in (the culture that they share with non-believers) in the name of that religion is quite another. This would be true even if the cultural rules they seek to enforce on non-believers were importantly associated with their religious doctrines; when that link is weak, as here, it’s even more true.

Yes, they’re outside the funeral, not in front of the casket and they’re exercising their freedom of speech and doing what they believe they have every right to do.

But it’s not their funeral. They don’t care one bit about the person in the casket. It’s simply a springboard for them to do their piece on.

For non-believers, the reason to stay away from the Virgin Mary is simply that we’re non believers. Using her as a springboard for our goals is like Fred Phelps using a dead soldier’s funeral as a springboard for his goals.

Maria Florencia Onori doesn’t need to be dressed up as the Virgin Mary to deserve the cover of Playboy, so why do it? Why should Mexican Playboy use something that someone else cares about deeply when it’s clear that they personally don’t care one bit about it?

We understood Neil Gaiman when he said,”… if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.”

There comes a time for non-believers to stand up for the believer’s right to have their beliefs respected. This is one of those times, especially if we are to have any hope of having our beliefs respected further down the line.