To those that would censor Free Speech
I understand that nobody likes the way the First Amendment has become a haven for parasites, weasels and other vermin. Religious bigots in particular use it as a means fo trying to defend their power. Yes, I have read some of Canada's law that seems to be able to shut down the Terry Jones types.
However, I offer this to show why I do NOT support limiting free speech.
Go down the line of every important figure that fought for rights, whether it is Martin Luther King, or Margaret Sanger, Eugene Debs or Thomas Paine. You will find one thread in common; every one of them had opponents that accused them of dangerous, hateful speech. It would be easy to write this off as some subterfuge by powerful White Men, but the truth is something a bit nastier. Many people did indeed feel threatened, intimidated, and degraded by the words that reformers say.
The folks in Dixie did not just feel offended by MLK, they felt he was threatening their culture and indeed, their lives. As we all know, those ideas are still very much alive, not just when the GOP calls Obama a monkey.
Many men, and yes, many women, felt Susan B Anthony and Margaret Sanger were a threat to womanhood itself. If you think that is dead, watch the conservative lady pundits, that, with a straight face, and in a blazer, talk as if women's very right to vote is a bad thing (yes Ann Coulter, that was aimed at you.)
And Islam is no different than any religion, it means it has great people who really do make an effort to feed hungry people, improve their lot, and at least live decent lives, it also has people that would kill, just as it's older sisters Christianity and Judaism do. Religion always plays by the same rules, which is why later faiths like Mormonism or Scientology tend to fit into the same patterns. However, societies must make sure it plays by rules. At first, that would lend credence to the idea of limting religious speech. However, that plays right into a major strategy of religion, the martyr game: the more your repress a faith, the more it tends to grow, and the less it fears the goverment.
And here we get into why limiting free speech is exactly what we do not want to do: if you limit free speech because religious folk get violent, they will get more violent. You are reinforcing the behavior, as surely as feeding a monkey in a skinner box does. If people see that we react a certain way because people get violent, then others will want to imitate the success of the rioters. Already, in Europe, people cheered Anders Brevik, because they felt he was only doing the same sort of violence that they think Muslims do. Of course he was wrong, but the fact remains that we cannot let people think we will yield to violence, because, sure enough, once the match hits the dry kindling, the blaze will keep burning until every bit of fuel is reduced to ash.
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