“Tasteless.” “Reprehensible.” “A new low.” “I’ll never buy your so-called paper again.”

[kentuck]

http://www.kentucky.com/opinion/editorial-cartoons/joel-pett/hq7h26/picture45456909/ALTERNATES/FREE_640/20151119pettRGB

<snip>
Did I attack his children? Of course not. Was the cartoon racist or critical of adopting children, as some are suggesting? The fact that he adopted children from Africa, a continent whose promise and challenges I routinely draw about, is the thing I admire the most about Bevin.

I did use the fact that he has children from another country in a piece designed to express outrage over a legitimate hot-button political issue. (Bevin used them in photo-ops and on TV commercials over the past two campaigns, but that’s another story.) I did this with my name signed to it, in a newspaper with a long history of tolerating and publishing opinions of all persuasions and on a page labeled “opinion.”

I understand that, for many readers, this cartoon may have been a bridge too far. But here’s an idea: Suppose we just use the means at our disposal here, while we still live in a country where freedoms are cherished, to discuss political issues?
....
<snip>
As it happens, I am in our nation’s capital, attending a fund-raiser which benefits cartoonists who labor in countries where political cartooning isn’t quite so appreciated, shall we say. Where calls to silence dissent are serious, where people’s reactionary impulse to quiet their perceived enemies has deadly consequences.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article45535464.html#storylink=cpy

[Shandris]

1. This kind of thing may fall on deaf ears, now that criminalization...I'm sorry, I mean 'the just...

...consequences of having an unpopular opinion'...have become acceptable tactics. Can't say this wasn't foreseen, though.

There is the very real chance that 'dissent' is about to become far, far harder than it ever was in Bush's day, especially now that even here on DU people have been mocking other's 'freeze peaches' for a while now, with little opposition. When even we've internalized the message that will be used to silence us, there's a whole lot of hard work to recover from.