Is Islam really the only taboo?

Yesterday’s NYTCLOTD (best initialism ever?) featured Ross “Do That Thing” Douthat’s column “Not Even in South Park?” which insuated that Islam was the only last taboo in our almost taboo-less society. He posits that the recent South Park debacle has shown that everything in American society is open for mockery—except Islam.

However, Glenn Greenwald evicerates his thesis, by pointing to a March 28, 2010 edition of the very same newspaper for whom “Do That Thing” writes, the New York Times:

It looks like Ross Douthat picked the wrong month to try to pretend that threat-induced censorship is a uniquely Islamic practice. Corpus Christi is the same play that was scheduled and then canceled (and then re-scheduled) by the Manhattan Theater Club back in 1998 as a result of “anonymous telephone threats to burn down the theater, kill the staff, and ‘exterminate’ McNally.” Both back then and now, leading the protests (though not the threats) was the Catholic League, denouncing the play as “blasphemous hate speech.”

I abhor the threats of violence coming from fanatical Muslims over the expression of ideas they find offensive, as well as the cowardly institutions which acquiesce to the accompanying demands for censorship. I’ve vigorously condemned efforts to haul anti-Muslim polemicists before Canadian and European “human rights” (i.e., censorship) tribunals. But the very idea that such conduct is remotely unique to Muslims is delusional, the by-product of Douthat’s ongoing use of his New York Times column for his anti-Muslim crusade and sectarian religious promotion.