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.

Tags

More like this

Why didn't I hear about this before? Why is it not in the media? On blogs? Lindsay reports on the new book "Steeplejacking" that documents how the Religious Right, hand-in-hand with the hawkish conservative Democrats, systematically, over the past couple of decades, performed hostile take-overs…
First, there was this awful news about Obama's support of "faith-based programs": Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans to expand President Bush's program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and -- in a move…
As I mentioned, I did get to hear a few minutes of Sen. John Cornyn's (R-Texas) opening remarks in this morning's Alito confirmation hearing and got a good chuckle out of it. As is common among partisans of both parties, he portrayed he and his party as motivated solely by a concern for truth and…
The infamous anti-gay legislator from Oklahoma, Sally Kern, was interviewed by the Oklahoma Daily. The story has some fine bon mots, like her definition of evolution: Kern defined evolution to me as "the process of wanting to create something or have something be perfect. Get rid of that which is…