Gay-Bashing in the Record Industry

Concerning Chuck Philips’ Aug. 5 articles on anti-gay slurs by recording artists:

Defending the “humor” in his Warner Bros. album “Have You Seen Me Lately?,” comedian Sam Kinison argues, “In the 1990s, it’s OK to do comedy about the Chernobyl disaster or the space shuttle blow-up, but God forbid you do a joke about gays, the last sacred cow in this society.”

Whoever told Kinison it’s OK to crack jokes about Chernobyl and the shuttle? Since when is any loss of life funny? And does he realize what those two events entailed for the living as well as the dead? Or is it that Kinison doesn’t give any more of a damn about them than he does about AIDS victims?

So-called comedians such as Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay--as well as rock or rap groups such as Guns N’ Roses and Public Enemy and their record company backers--all feel they have the God-given right to say any damned thing they want to about anyone . . . women, Jews, blacks, Latinos, gays, Vietnamese, etc.

No clear-thinking person wants censorship, but there is a commodity--supposedly built into us--called sensitivity/self-restraint/responsibility. If those words are too deep for Kinison, Clay and their ilk to grasp, let them recall Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ remark: “ . . . freedom of expression does not give us the right to stand up in a crowded theater and yell ‘Fire!’ ”

DAVID R. MOSS

Los Angeles