Dearest Ones,
It is certainly a difficult situation. However, in this case I feel I must side with Voltaire: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Freedom of Speech includes the Freedom to be Offended, the Freedom to Counter-Argue, and the Freedom to Challenge Intellectually. Note that it is not the Freedom from being Offended. To silence someone is to step on all those hard fought freedoms.
Allow me to give you a personal example:
I (like many of my Christian brethren, I find) have engaged in counter-protests against the Westboro Baptist Church and it’s patriarch, Fred Phelps. If there is a single human being alive on the face of the Earth today which tests my restraint and my ability to forgive and make peace it is that man and his clan. Words cannot describe how much he angers me, how much he disappoints me.
He is the living embodiment of traits that I find most abominable: he warps and twists scripture to suit his own warped goals and yet is theologically ignorant. He perverts the Word and work of Christ and defames all of Christianity. He is arrogant, sadistic, cruel, and merciless. He is greedy and seeks to line his pockets at the expense of others.
I have faced this man in person. I have tried to reason with him. I have tried to reach out to the human soul locked away in that decaying monument to corruption he calls a body. Friends and family, I tell you this: there is something terribly, horribly wrong at work within that man. I am never so drained, so weary, so much in pain than when I face him. I daresay that if the Adversary can work through human puppets, than Fred Phelps is proof of this.
Yet, after all that. I would still not take away his freedom of speech. For if we use the law to silence those we disagree with, will not the day come when someone uses it to silence us?
When the Communists came to power in my motherland, they promised that unlike Batista, they would honor the people’s right to speak freely–so long as they did not do anything that threatened the revolution.
What happened? Religious groups were incarcerated and executed. Homosexuals were beaten, tortured, and killed. Poets, journalists, and other writers were slaughtered. Why? Because in putting that limitation on the people’s speech, Guevara, Castro, and the rest could define ANYTHING as being ‘inappropriate’ for the revolution and silence them.
Yours,
Raul
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