The timid defense of free speech

Some of our liberal friends, particularly the art lovers among them, are terrified of the hobgoblins that Ralph Waldo Emerson warned about. “A foolish consistency,” he famously said, “is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers and divines.”

We see this writ large in the threat to public peace and the lives of the innocent by Islamic radicals. The radicals, who maim and kill in the name of the Prophet, are treated with respect (if not terror), and the Christians who have threatened no one, must be hectored, lectured and exiled to the fringes of the public square.

Pamela Geller, who organized the draw-the-Prophet cartoon contest in Texas that two homegrown ISIS wannabes tried to shut down with murder and lost their own lives trying, is a villain for some sunshine defenders of free speech. One pundit, writing in The Washington Post, is all for the First Amendment, err, uh, umm, “but.” She scolds Mzz Geller “for instigating this unnecessary clash.” As an “operating principle,” Kathleen Parker writes, “mightn’t we try less incendiary means of problem-solving? I don’t know, maybe something less likely to lead to violence?”

Some wizards on the left even accuse Mzz Geller of committing “hate speech,” the currently fashionable name for harsh opinions you may not agree with. He includes Mzz Geller’s drawing contest. Chris Cuomo of CNN, who says he’s a graduate of a law school, even says her “hate speech” does not rise to speech protected by the Constitution. This sounds like something he misremembers from a mail-order course of the Grinder’s Switch College of Law, Cosmetology, Dietary Science and Creative Writing.

The Constitution was not written by the sort of law-school weenies who would write it today, and it is not meant to protect nice, refined and respectable speech. It protects free speech, brash, unadorned and with the bark on. If you don’t like it, don’t listen. Respectable speech, the kind you might hear in nice, refined parlors, needs no protection.

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