No more blasphemy laws, please

It's very nice of Obama to have occasionally acknowledged the existence of freethinkers in his speeches, but it doesn't mean much when his administration endorses blasphemy laws.

The public and private curtailment on religious criticism threatens religious and secular speakers alike. However, the fear is that, when speech becomes sacrilegious, only the religious will have true free speech. It is a danger that has become all the more real after the decision of the Obama administration to join in the effort to craft a new faith-based speech standard. It is now up to Congress and the public to be heard before the world leaves free speech with little more than a hope and a prayer.

Free speech doesn't mean you only have the right to say things that the majority agrees upon — it is also the right of a minority to offend the majority. I don't know why that is so hard to get across to some people.

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Saturdays I tend to use for soapboxing on things which may or may not be related to physics. Today I think it will be free speech. There's a Supreme Court case involving Hillary: The Movie in the context of McCain-Fiengold campaign finance law.
What sensory cues do we rely on during the perception of speech? Primarily, of course, speech perception involves auditory cues - we pay close attention to the sounds generated by the speaker.
With the whole controversy around Michael Savage being blocked from entering England because of his inflammatory comments I thought
In the United States we have the free speech built into the law, so it is somewhat a moot point. Of course, as evidenced by comments in many other Western countries the limits to speech are bounded by public consensus. So I decided to look at the GSS in terms of response to one question: