The Supreme Court is about to rule on whether the word that begins with “F”; the word that should not be said, is always and everywhere obscene. Is it, in other words, obscene only when it refers to sexual activity, or is it obscene when used as an adjective, adverb or noun for the purposes of adding emphasis to a non-sexual expression. For instance, was it obscene for Chase Utley to refer to the Phillies as the “World Fucking Champions” or was he simply adding the word for emphasis, the term “world” before “champions” presumably not impressive enough. The particular speakers at issue in the Supreme Court case include Bono and Cher. Only an FCC controlled by the Bush Administration and the religious right would want to make an issue of this sort of thing. In a delicious irony the plaintiff in the case is Fox.
I don’t know how the court will rule, though I suspect at least two of the three remaining justices who fucking stole the 2000 election, an obscenity that fucking dwarfs anything Bono has ever said or done, will be offended at the use of the word in any and all contexts.
The lower court found against the FCC, pointing out that, for instance, Dick Cheney wasn’t thinking about sex when he suggested that Pat Leahy do something with himself. The dissent was having nothing of it:
A dissenting judge, Pierre N. Leval, agreed that many people who use the most adaptable curse word do not intend to refer to sex. (He gave examples: “a student who gets a disappointing grade on a test, a cook who burns the roast, or a driver who returns to his parked car to find a parking ticket on the windshield.”) But, whatever the speaker’s intentions, Judge Leval added, “a substantial part of the community, and of the television audience, will understand the word as freighted with an offensive sexual connotation.” (Emphasis added)
Here I beg the judge’s indulgence. Which “offensive sexual connotation” does he have in mind? I’m not talking about the “sexual connotation” part; I get that. What I wonder is this: is there something more offensive about the sex connoted by this particular term than that connoted by the terms “have sex with”, “make love”, “copulate”, or any of the other words or euphemisms we use in place of the sturdy Anglo Saxon word in question? As far as I know, they all refer to the same physical act. We don’t even outlaw the word “rape”, which certainly has a more offensive sexual connotation than anything the big bad word brings to mind. I did, by the way, solely in the interests of scholarship, consult my OED to see if the word had any particularly offensive sexual connotation. To stretch a point, it may have one when used as a noun, when characterizing a person as a good … you know what. Something tells me that’s not what the good judge had in mind, though it’s not clear what he did have in mind. If this word does, in fact, connote a particularly offensive sexual act, practice or attitude, isn’t it odd that there are no analogous obscenities for the act of killing? Any word one wants to use for that act is fair game and I simply can’t imagine Judge Scalia telling us there’s any we can’t say.
What’s truly a shame is that we can’t put Bush and his minions in jail for the multiple obscene acts (by my definition) in which they have engaged. One of them, a misdemeanor to be sure, in comparisons to the biggies, is wasting taxpayer money in order to brand a single word as obscene while engaging in the twin obscenities of waging unjustified war and engaging in, and attempting to justify, systematic torture.
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