Internet memes pop up in response to every situation these days. They're meant to provide a concise critical or satirical analysis of some event or point of view. Because they are nicely bite-sized and written to provide a quick resolution, they take on the status of crystallized wisdom, even when they're not.
One I saw today states that if a bakery can refuse to make a cake for a gay couple's wedding, then a musician can refuse to perform at the Kennedy Center under its current management. In so doing, the meme makes the case that either the bakery is justified in withholding service from the gays or that the performers must be compelled to play their scheduled gigs at the Kennedy Center.
The person who posted the meme does not support either of those positions, but her meme does. I don't care what anyone meant by it. The very essence of a nation of laws is that words matter, logic matters, argumentative integrity matters, and that public statements should reflect the actual situation, not some tit-for-tat argument that is supposed to open the eyes of a right wing hypocrite.
The meme equates a musician or performer to a storefront business, a service provider. "Hey, I want some melodious philosophical poetry delivered through a framework of classically trained popular music. Think you can do it? Send in your sealed bids." It's just another business.
Musicians in particular run the risk of being viewed this way because so many of them make a point that they are professionals who should get money for what they do, not "exposure," and because they're just pulling ideas out of their head. Even when they "make it" and get recording contracts, the recording and distribution companies are completely soulless business ventures that squeeze every dime out of them.
What is an artist? What is an entertainer? I have been hearing people bitch for years about actors and singers who use their prominence to support political philosophies. "They should just shut up and entertain us! It's what we're paying them for!" The actor, the musician are servants, and we are all their boss.
In the land of the free, we keep coming up with reasons why certain categories are not free. The First Amendment has an asterisk. "An entertainer has too powerful a voice! It's not fair to let them use it to broadcast their personal beliefs!"
Excuse me, what? I have fundamental disagreements with a number of celebrities, but I absolutely disagree that their celebrity alone should mute them. I just know that those particular celebrities are assholes, and I will view all of their professional work through that lens. If they're actors, I'll look at the roles they take, and sift carefully through the lines they deliver. If they're a real asshole, I will already have no interest in wasting an hour or two of my irreplaceable life watching whatever stupid shit they decided make. They can still make it.
In order to become a celebrity, an actor or musician has to have put in the time and effort to get paid at all, then get paid fairly regularly, then get paid perhaps a significant amount. They have to have developed an audience through their personal qualities on stage or screen. They helped build that big soapbox, so you can't tell them they don't deserve to speak from it. You can turn your back, walk away, heckle from the pit, whatever, but you have no moral justification for relegating them to servant status.
A musician should have the right to rethink a gig if the venue management changes drastically between the time the gig was scheduled, and the date of the performance. You vote with your wallet in this country. The musicians canceling at the Kennedy Center are voting with their paychecks to withhold their support for what the current regime is doing at home and abroad. We should all be expressing our condemnation of the current regime, and work noisily and diligently to have them removed for criminal acts. We should all be refusing to cooperate. If musicians have embarrassed you because they have courage that you lack, don't blame them.
Is it the same as a bakery refusing to make a cake for a gay couple? Discrimination against anyone on the basis of sexual orientation is a primitive prejudice based on immutable characteristics. Discrimination against a treasonous, criminal regime on the basis that they are destroying the very fabric of the country itself is a heroic act of resistance.
In the Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission decision, the United States Supreme Court upheld every principle that should have given the win to the Commission, only to cite a technicality in the commission's language as indicating that the commission itself acted with selective discrimination against the religious beliefs of the bakery's owner. The resulting decision was full of language that narrows the scope of the precedent, but all anyone remembers now is that the bakery won.
The subsequent case in Washington State, between a flower shop and a gay couple, ultimately went against the florist. Appeals by the florist's legal team even cited Masterpiece Cakeshop when asking the Supreme Court to remand the case to Washington State for rehearing to include any relevant aspects of the bakery case. The Washington courts found that nothing from the bakery case applied.
Similarly, the meme's citation of the bakery case in relation to the Kennedy Center gig cancellations is equally flawed, and, as a piece of propaganda, more harmful. It fully leaves the door open for bigots to say, "Okay, we baked your gays a cake. Now make your musicians play for our Dear Leader."
Why you say what you say, and how you say it, are vital to the success of whether what you say gets you the result you wanted. In the case of the bakery, civil rights commission members went on record with language broadly condemning religion in ways that may be valid social criticisms, but which demolished their credibility as an impartial body rendering a decision about a specific discrimination case based on laws existing at the time. The case itself is a stark lesson in choosing your words carefully.
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