A quote dubiously attributed to Oscar Wilde defines a gentleman as someone who never gives offence unintentionally.

Clearly, the clutch of drag queens who made obnoxious public fools of themselves at the opening of the Paris Olympics had, by definition, no intention of behaving like, errrr, gentlemen. 

The question remains, however, whether their gauche, self-indulgent “parody” of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper was a deliberate finger in the eye or an accidental treading on the toes of the world’s 2.4 billion Christians.

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Initially, Olympic organizers sought to defend the dreck by waving the obscuring banner of liberté, fraternité, egalité: freedom,  brotherhood, equality. 

“We imagined a ceremony to show our values and our principles so we gave a very committed message,” essayed Paris 2024 President Tony Estanguet.

Thomas Jolly, the ceremony’s artistic director, fed into the ensuing brouhaha a weird melange of messaging about advancing diversity and inclusivity by “pushing the boundaries” of artistic freedom: “Diversity means being together. We wanted to include everybody.”

Except, as the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of France icily noted, “art” that involves a troupe of drag queens, gay men and trans people in mocking imitation of Christ and the apostles while a male dancer exposes his painted testicles could not be more offensively exclusionary of those who hold the Eucharist as the sacred centre of Christian life.

Voices ranging from Bishop Robert Barron to Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvi and Elon Musk chimed agreement. “Even as a Jew, I was infuriated by this outrageous insult to Jesus and Christianity,” said tech entrepreneur Eli David.

Ultimately, Olympic organizers sought to calm the waters with a cliché-sodden “apology” deploying the typical “if anyone was offended” language that is simultaneously redundant and contradictory. (Obviously, people were offended otherwise no apology would be needed, yet the conditional word “if” negates the sincerity of apologizing.)

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Will this latest debacle just pass into what passes for history? Will the offended remain aggrieved while the offenders laugh up their sleeves even as they profess wide-eyed innocence? Probably. But if so, a genuine opportunity to seriously examine what it means to give – and take – offence will be lost. 

In this instance, for instance, authoritative LGBT voices could speak up to say: “Enough already! We are now the mainstream of major democratic societies. We have won what we wanted to win and now must act with graciousness toward those who differ from us. Stop with the pointless, puerile provocations in our name –  and tuck away your painted testicles in public.”

Just so, leading figures from the art world could make the long overdue point that behaving like adolescent performative morons does not qualify as being “artistic,” and insisting on “shocking the bourgeoisie” in 2024 exhibits a failure of imagination compounded by absence of talent. “In case you haven’t noticed,” real artists might point out, “the bourgeoisie can no longer be shocked. They’re numb. Have you watched Netflix?”

On the spiritual side, too, it might serve clergy and lay faithful alike to cease the reflexive ki-yiing of “offense” each time pathetic would-be provocateurs wheel out yet another intellectually exhausted attention-seeking gambit. Why, after all, continue playing along? Would not a far more productive response be: “Oh, you’ve got testicles? Aren’t you special? But so does half the population, you know?” 

Might not such an approach effectively move the discussion beyond the shopworn cycle of offended-offender to a fresh dialogue about what that apostle of common sense, U.S. writer Peggy Noonan, has called “the uglification of everything.” 

In a column last spring, Noonan nailed the riveting point that universal “uglification” is what arises when boundaries aren’t just pushed, but obliterated, i.e. when offensiveness without awareness of what it means to offend enters a state of social freefall.

Art and performance become, she wrote, “ugly, bizarre, inartistic, fundamentally stupid…obscene but in a purposeless way, without meaning.”

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And here, she said, is why that matters: “Even though it isn’t new, uglification is rising and spreading as an artistic attitude, and it can’t be good for us. Because it speaks of self-hatred, and a society that hates itself, and hates life, won’t last. Because it gives those who are young nothing to love and feel soft about. Because we need beauty to keep our morale up. Because life isn’t merde, in spite of what our entertainment geniuses say.”

Accidently, or perhaps accidentally on purpose, the Olympics in Paris, the city of light where Oscar Wilde died, might have afforded us a not-so-gentle reminder of that truth.