I received a note from a reader a month ago about a cartoon we printed in which ducks were standing on top of each other in a trench coat, waiting in line to get communion from a priest as “free bread.”
The reader said the cartoon was distasteful, disrespectful and vulgar.
I grew up in a Catholic household and spent 12 years in Catholic schools, and I can see why devout Catholics might be offended by that comic. Communion is considered the body of Christ by Catholics, so portraying ducks preparing to feast on it was, well, let’s say ill-considered.
Was it bad enough to cause outrage? Probably not. It’s just a comic, after all, an attempt at humor. Some attempts work, and some don’t. The reader who wrote, though, was offended. Her note was courteous and civil, but she said we should be more careful.
Her note was in my mind this week when we considered nearly full-page illustration on the cover of In The CLE in Friday’s print edition of The Plain Dealer. One of the purposes of this column is to take you inside our decision process, and this is what happened involving the illustration.
In The CLE is our guide to the weekend, and Friday’s version was about all the ways you could celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. The first draft of the cover, running from the top of the page to the bottom, had an image of a grinning St. Patrick himself, in a pose Dean Martin might have used, holding a mug of sloshing green beer.
Now, I’m Irish through and through – 98 percent according to a DNA test. (Counties Kerry, Galway and Cork.) My wife and I named our children Patrick and Colleen. We’ve visited the homesteads in Ireland from which my ancestors migrated. I’m proud of my heritage. And I can say without hesitation that I take no offense at an illustration of St. Patrick sloshing a beer. We asked other Irish people in our newsroom, and none of them were offended, either. Irish people like a joke.
The illustration is very good. It might make you laugh. Thematically, it works. March 17 is a day to celebrate a cherished saint of Ireland. The illustration contains the key elements - a big image of the saint wearing a liturgical headdress and robe along with the green beer that marks many a celebration. (It also had a smiling green snake at his feet along with a book that I presume is a Bible.)
Based on my Irish Catholic background, however, I know that a not-insignificant percentage of Irish Catholics are devout and would look unkindly upon an illustration of a beloved saint sloshing a tankard of green beer.
If we had used the illustration, we almost certainly would have heard from people who were offended. Given that some of those people may have been imbibing their own green beer, we imagine that their objections might have grown more vociferous and pointed as the day progressed.
After some healthy discussion among editors and page designers, our consensus was to go in another direction and use a photo of a past Cleveland parade.
At The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com, we have plenty of moments in a year when we publish content that offends some portion of the community. We carry opinion pieces, and readers vehemently disagree with some of them. People who support various politicians express fury when we call out their lies. That’s fine, and we expect it.
What we shouldn’t do is needlessly anger people. Plenty of options exist to illustrate a weekend guide, so we should choose one unlikely to offend. Which is what we did.
If you’ve read this far, I’ve likely piqued your curiosity, leaving you wanting to see the St. Patrick illustration. In deference to those who would take offense, I’m not sharing it. I’ll leave it to your imagination.
Maybe next year we can repurpose it, replacing the beer in his hand with a shamrock. If we do, you won’t need much imagination to understand where we were headed.
I’m at cquinn@cleveland.com.
Thanks for reading.
