A Christian minister was told by the Capitol Police that he might be arrested if he were to read the Christmas Story out loud at the foot of the Capitol Holiday Tree. His action would contravene the separation of church and state, they said, and would therefore constitute an illegal demonstration. He said he planned to go ahead anyway — that was to be at noon today, but I don’t know how it turned out.In other news, Turkey withdrew its ambassador in Paris after the French lower house passed a bill to make it illegal to deny the Armenian Holocaust.
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3 comments:
Running in the family
They convicted the traitors after WW2
- Now their grandchildren are going to judge Breivik
Judge Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen's grandfather also had Knut Hamsun put into psychiatric ward at the time.
http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/oslobomben/artikkel.php?artid=10024934
What ever happened to ( I do not believe in what you say.
But I shall defend to the death your right to say it.?
Freedom of speech is more of a "utility" freedom than a "basic" freedom. To make an analogy, I wouldn't die for the right to have military-grade weapons. I think that they are cool and all, but there are other things that are more cool that I wouldn't die over.
I would, however, willingly die to protect my loved ones from a bunch of murderers. I might not have that option without some kind of useful weapons to hand, though. So the right to bear arms is one that I might need in a pinch in order for me to actually have the option of protecting something worth dying over (and perhaps even not dying in the process). If law-abiding people are armed, criminality becomes a losing proposition and you get less of it. So other people being armed also benefits me as well.
Now, I'm willing to stake my life on saying what I believe, and I might be willing to stake my life on protecting those who say what I believe, but I wouldn't really die to protect the right of people to say things I don't believe. But if they don't have that right, then they might go all taqiyya about their beliefs. I wouldn't much like that.
So I would be willing to put my life on the line to defend a society in which people told the truth about what they believed, but I wouldn't put my life on the line just for the sake of having people say stuff I don't believe myself. To clarify, I wouldn't put my life on the line for the sake of an Islamic-Shariah state, where everybody would have the right to say things I don't believe...because it wouldn't include the right for them to say things I do believe, nor give me a reasonable certainty that those espousing Islam really meant it.
Chiu Chun-Ling.
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