September 16, 2012

Dangerous Precedent

I am frightened by law enforcement officials coming on a recent midnight and taking away the person supposed to have made a film said to have offended Muslims. Is this not an attempt to appease the barbaric murderers who have stormed our embassies in recent days? Why are we so concerned about a film when we should be concerned with how to deal with the situation there? Is not this filmmaker still covered under the First Amendment? Isn't America still the land of the free, the place where you can speak truth to power, a place of religious liberty? Isn't this filmmaker, whatever we may think of his films, protected by the First Amendment? Doesn't America still refuse to negotiate with terrorists?

I would hope that those people who endlessly complained about the detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay will complain just as much about how this case is going.

This event sets three dangerous precedents. The first is that it tells the world that if our embassies are attacked, instead of responding with outrage and a sincere desire for justice to be done in the face of evil, we instead respond with apologies and acquiescence to what someone claims a mob desires. The second is that, despite the First Amendment, there now really are certain subjects that are too controversial for us to approach. Since they are not written down as law, no one knows quite what these subjects are, or what we may or may say about them, but enforcers will be present to hand out whatever penalties they deem necessary whenever they decide that we have gone too far. This does not describe a free people at all.

The third dangerous precedent is that the inconsistencies in political correctness reinforced by this matter have laid the groundwork for a hierarchy of religions in America. Why is political correctness inconsistent? It demands that Christians not only put up with art that offends their faith, but also be forced to pay for it through taxes and government grants. Why then does political correctness refuse to protect a filmmaker, an artist, who is alleged to offended Muslims? This inconsistency has made Christianity the lowest religion on the totem pole, and its followers - protected, I remind you, by the First Amendment - into second-class citizens. We are moving toward a dangerous point, where, to modify the Orwellian phrase, some speech is more equal than others, and some religions are more equal than others.

I can understand some reluctance to appear to side with the alleged filmmaker, but we should remember that when one person's freedoms are violated, all of our freedoms are in jeopardy. Isn't there an old quote in which the speaker, even though he or she doesn't agree with what someone else says, will defend to the death their right to say it? We should also remember from a poem, inspired by the Holocaust, that if we do nothing when the government arbitrarily takes innocent people away, eventually there will be no one to speak up for us when we are arbitrarily taken away.