Bacon in a Park is a ‘Hate Crime’ but Not a Crucifix in Urine

by: Gary DeMar


Hate crimes are beginning to stack up. But determining what constitutes a “hate crime” is in the eye of the beholder. Actually, it’s in the eye of liberals who only see criminal activity when it’s leveled at one of their protected classes. Here’s the latest insanity. While California has been described as the “land of fruits and nuts,” New York is competing to be the fruitiest and nuttiest land of them all.

“Police are investigating an unusual bias crime on Staten Island. Muslims who gathered for prayer to celebrate the end of Ramadan in a city park found bacon scattered on the ground. . . . [B]efore most of the faithful arrived for Morning Prayer, it was discovered that someone had scattered a quantity of raw bacon on the field.”

“‘This has been determined to be a bias event on the part of our Hate Crimes Task Force,’ NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters.” 

Where were our government officials when artist and photographer Andres Serrano unveiled his “Piss Christ”? It was a photograph of a “small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist’s urine. The piece was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art’s ‘Awards in the Visual Arts’ competition, which is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a United States Government agency that offers support and funding for artistic projects.”
What was the response from the art community? Here’s one example:

“The art critic Lucy R. Lippard has presented a constructive case for the formal value of Serrano’s Piss Christ, which she characterizes as mysterious and beautiful. She writes that the work is ‘a darkly beautiful photographic image . . . the small wood and plastic crucifix becomes virtually monumental as it floats, photographically enlarged, in a deep rosy glow that is both ominous and glorious.’ Lippard suggests that the formal values of the image can be regarded separately from other meanings.”

In 2010, there was the A Fire in My Belly video that was being shown at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, another government-funded institution. It was later moved to the Museum of Modern Art in New York where it was safe and protected from critics. The video included a scene with a crucifix covered in ants

Wendy Olsoff, a co-owner of the New York City art gallery that manages David Wojnarowicz’s work, said the artist frequently used animals and insects to represent metaphors for interactions in human society. “This was not hate speech,” she said. “It’s a compassionate look at how we live. He’s overlaying the insect world on the human world. … And he used ants in a series of surreal images, using them on guns, clocks and toy soldiers.”
As long as the ants were also crawling on non-religious items that meant that the video was “art” and not an expression of hate.
But it turns out that the bacon was left there for stray animals and had nothing to do with intimidating Muslims. The person who put the bacon in the park made these comments on a radio show:

“I had put the bacon there. It was going bad in my trunk and I put it out for the scavengers like the opossums and the raccoons and sea gulls, and I did not intend for that to cause anybody any problems.”

Maybe the police who were put on “bacon patrol” looking for a “hate” crime were the same officers who shot the nine bystanders near the Empire State Building last week.