Thursday, December 17, 2015

Erasing the past : Ian McKellen

from a Details Magazine interview with the actor Ian McKelllen :


Details: Is it true that when you stay at hotels you tear out the Bible page that condemns homosexuality?
Ian McKellen: I do, absolutely. I'm not proudly defacing the book, but it's a choice between removing that page and throwing away the whole Bible. And I'm not really the first: I got delivered a package of 40 of those pages -- Leviticus 18:22 -- that had been torn out by a married couple I know. They put them on a bit of string so that I could hang it up in the bathroom.

I'm not sure exactly what this petty censorship accomplishes.  Although he says "I'm not proudly defacing the book" it kind of sounds like that is exactly what he's doing.  Both he and the married couple aren't keeping it a secret but bragging about it. It isn't as if he was replacing them with bibles with the offending passage edited out : people will notice a page missing; especially one torn out by an angry censor.

Totalitarianism one page at a time.

No comments: