The Democrat was hit with about 20,000 demands for apology.ĭoug's response? "In this country, we do not apologize for our opinions."įor cartoonists, now more than ever, that is a gospel to live by. Death threats flooded inboxes, and the cartoon was condemned by the secretary-general of the Muslim World League. Jihad was launched against the newspaper's servers in an attempt to shut down the website. The cartoon's main target, of course, was the faith-based politics of a different denomination. Besides referring to the vehicle that Timothy McVeigh rode into Oklahoma City, the drawing was a takeoff on the 'What Would Jesus Drive?' campaign created by Christian evangelicals to challenge the morality of owning gas-guzzling SUVs. Uncle Doug wrote about the piece for Columbia Journalism Review: I drew a cartoon that showed a man in Middle Eastern apparel at the wheel of a Ryder truck hauling a nuclear warhead. In 2002 at the Tallahassee Democrat, a cartoon captioned "What Would Mohammed Drive?" ushered in the outrage from devout followers of you-know-who. In New York, his cartoons critiqued the pope's policy against women priests.
In Charlotte, cartoons targeting Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and depicting Jerry Falwell as the serpent in the Garden of Eden earned my uncle the title of "Tool of Satan." Like an ink-slinging Woody Guthrie, he rambled around to newsrooms in Florida, Charlotte, Atlanta, New York and Tulsa.Īll along the way, his cartoons outraged intolerant true believers of all types. Offending true believers was one of the master arcs of Uncle Doug's cartoon career. That gospel comes chapter and verse from the book of one of our nation's Holy Saints of Satire, my late, great uncle and Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Doug Marlette. For the sake of our freedom, we must hold one commandment sacred: Thou shalt not apologize for opinions. I pray to the gods of cartooning that we do not. Isn't it time for cartoonists to wise up, bow down and face the fatwa? Heck, Sony showed us that even a chubby young despot such as Kim Jong Un deserves a little American cowardice in the face of controversy.
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