COMMENT

How ungrateful the New Zealand community is. For years the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards has been working tirelessly and selflessly to ban any film that it saw as lowering the standards of our community. So you can imagine its shock when the chief censor gave The Passion of Christ an R16 rating.

How could he have missed the "where Jesus is the main character" exception in the Film, Video, and Publications Classification Act 1993?

You have to laugh at the exquisite irony of the situation. The society has been stung by the very system it tries to exploit.

In light of the arguments it has put forward for banning other films such as Baise Moi, The Piano Teacher and Y tu mama tambien, its case for lowering the rating of The Passion is at best weak, at worst blatantly, unashamedly hypocritical.

It also highlights how limiting others' freedom expression is a double-edged sword.

What the society apparently fails to appreciate is that freedom of expression, as guaranteed by our New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, means freedom of expression for all, not just Christians or conservatives.

The right is not exclusively owned by a select group who proclaim to be guardians of community standards. Nor is it a right that only those who express popular views are entitled to.

As Grant Huscroft, former lecturer at the University of Auckland, has written, the very point of freedom of expression must be to afford protection to those whose expression lacks community approval, for theirs is the only sort of expression which requires protection.

Freedom of expression often comes at a high price - if the society wants its expression tolerated so must it tolerate the expression its members may find intolerable.

The same freedom of expression which would allow the violent depiction of the life of Jesus to be shown in cinemas would also allow the showing of violence in other films, such as Baise Moi.

What this case sharply illustrates is that the moment you call for someone else's freedom of expression to be limited so are you opening your own to such a limitation.

But presuming that the society should actually decide what the community may view, is there any merit in its case?

First it claims the violence contained in the film is justified by its historical context. According to the society the film depicts the most significant and influential story to have shaped Western culture.

Regardless of the strong possibility that the film is factually inaccurate (for example it conveys only a Christian understanding of how Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism came to be separated), we have not seen the society appealing the ratings of films representing other non-Christian historical events. Maybe we do need such violence to remind us of the lessons from the past, but where were they when Saving Private Ryan was rated R15?