Squaring the Culture

The editor of a Belarus newspaper was sentenced to three years in prison for reprinting a caricature of Muhammed that was originally published in a Danish newspaper.

The action says something about the iron-fisted rule of Belarus President Lukashenko, but it says something worth repeating about free speech.

It’s a Christian idea. And while there’s no state religion and I don’t want one, it’s an existential fact that we obtained freedom of speech by thinking like Christians, and that if we as a culture stop thinking like Christians, we’ll stop valuing free speech, and it will slip away.

It’s clearly not a Muslim idea; just ask Mark Steyn. Muslims are too busy rioting over what they consider inflammatory cartoons, and filing suit to stop the publication of books with which they disagree. I’ve never quite understood why they’re so agitated by infidels acting like infidels; but maybe that’s because I think like a Christian.

It’s clearly not a Progressive idea; just ask Pope Benedict VXI, who just had to cancel a public speech because Leftists were shouting him down. Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard reprints an op-ed from the Times of London that takes American leftists to task for their lack of intellectual flexibility; the habit of the Left to silence anything with which they disagree is becoming ominous.

And it’s clearly not an Atheist idea. The 20th century gave us a clear picture of how Atheist regimes treat divergent ideas, and the 100 million murders that resulted give a reasonable man sufficient reason to doubt the Atheist commitment to open expression.

This is the irony of self-government; the people have every right to embrace ideas that, if followed to their logical conclusion, erase their liberties and return them to the darkness from which they won their freedom in the first place. Self-government confers the power to choose your next slave-master.

The war against terrorism crucially defends liberty against a set of religious ideas that threaten it. If we value liberty, we must not fail to endure the difficulty of war in the defense of liberty.

Oh… here’s the price of my membership in the Refusing Dhimmitude Club:

Do I believe all Muslims bomb things? Of course not. But I’m waiting for peaceful Muslims everywhere to decide they’re more interested in objecting to the use of their faith to kill innocents than in suing to end free speech. And in the meantime, I choose to exercise my remaining free speech rights by emphasizing the violence the West is suffering at the hands of radicals invoking the name of Mohammed. Call it my Jihad For Free Speech.