Last October, the car of a Waynesville, North Carolina, man was tagged with the words DIE FAG in blue spray paint.  I know this because the story appeared on our local news.  Waynesville is 30 miles from here.

Last week, the exterior wall of the Living Word Spirited Baptist Church in Kannapolis, North Carolina, was tagged with SATAN ♥’s YOU! in blue spray paint.  I know this because the story appeared on our local news.  Kannapolis is 130 miles from here.

Over the weekend, the base of the Vance Monument in Asheville’s town square was tagged with BLACK LIVES MATTER in blue spray paint.  I know this because the story was featured prominently on our local news.  Zebulon Vance was a local lawyer and politician who became a Confederate army colonel and eventually governor of the state.

I happen to think that blue spray paint, like green money, is not speech.  But my opinion, that one person’s property is not the next person’s canvas, does not seem to be universally shared around here.  Take, for example, Leisa Rundquist, department chair of art and art history at UNC Asheville.  She maintains that “art needs an audience to be art” and views the graffiti debate issue as relative: “Artists are part of society, and their artistic practices may or may not conform to laws and customs.  What was shocking in the past is no longer shocking, and what is illegal today may be legal in the future.”

I would remind Ms. Rundquist that there are countless modes of artistic expression that do not invove appropriating another person’s property for one’s own use.  I also maintain that it is absurd for Ms. Rundquist to encourage illegal behavior on the premise that it may be legal in the future.  By her logic, should she not also discourage acts that are legal now because they may become illegal in the future?

When a person lives in a world of self-blurred lines, he can justify whatever he paints, whomever he hates, and anything he does.  That is not expression — it is contempt.