The wonderful Roxane Gay is made uneasy by #JesuisCharlie, but while I don’t concur with her, the disagreement won’t move me to violence.

The profanity of Voltaire and Buñuel and Bruce is just as important as their supposedly sacred targets, and the sacrosanct which isn’t open to ridicule is closed off and ready for a fall from grace. I wish during the 1950s people had been liberated enough to speak about the sexual abuse of children that was rampant in the Catholic Church. Plenty must have known. But just imagine the rebuke that would have rained down on those who dared such impiety. Who are they to ridicule the church?

From Gay’s new Guardian piece about the Hebdo aftermath:

I believe in the freedom of expression, unequivocally – though, as I have written before, I wish more people would understand that freedom of expression is not freedom from consequence. I find some of the work of Charlie Hebdo distasteful, because there is a preponderance of bigotry of all kinds in many of their cartoons’ sentiments. Still, my distaste should not dictate the work the magazine produces or anything else. The cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo – and writers and artists everywhere – should be able to express themselves and challenge authority without being murdered. Murder is not an acceptable consequence for anything.

Yet it is also an exercise of freedom of expression to express offense at the way satire like Charlie Hebdo’s characterizes something you hold dear – like your faith, your personhood, your gender, your sexuality, your race or ethnicity.

Demands for solidarity can quickly turn into demands for groupthink, making it difficult to express nuance. It puts the terms of our understanding of the situation in black and white – you are either with us or against us – instead of allowing people to mourn and be angry while also being sympathetic to complexities that are being overlooked.•