Leave it to Joseph Bottum to take the simple proposition of mocking The Boston Globe for its double standard in the Danish cartoon row and somehow manage to muddle the issue:

Tolerance for diverging viewpoints isn’t the reason the Globe refuses to publish racist material; if anything, such tolerance ought to require publishing the vile stuff. Newspaper [sic] don’t publish racist remarks because they’re wrong—and error has no rights. Oh, the erroneous holders of such errors may have some rights, but the error itself has no business in a newspaper.

This is an interesting thing for Mr. Bottum to say. He might well be right that error should have no rights, but that would take him deep into my kind of reactionary country where neither he nor any of his colleagues at First Things wants to go. A liberal society with “freedom, democracy and all that good stuff,” as Col. Tigh would say, is supposed to allow speech of all kinds, including those opinions that the majority finds erroneous and even pernicious. This is one reason why people do not long maintain a liberal society.

Obviously, newspapers cannot simply print known falsehoods and libel, but in the realm of opinion (where both racist remarks and the “inflammatory” cartoons would fall) “error” certainly does have rights, because it is not (yet) legally anyone’s business to ban “error” from print and other media. Newspaper publishers choose to ban certain kinds of things, but fortunately they do not get to determine whether a given opinion is actually outside the protection of the law.

This state of affairs is, if I may be rather blunt, why Mr. Bottum can continue to write the foolish and wrong things that he so often does. It is also why Muslims and any number of other religious minorities can express their outrage at having their prophet or religion mocked. Under a different, older dispensation, the “error” of Islam would have few or no rights. But, of course, the only “error” Mr. Bottum and his colleagues are prepared to censure with such ferocity is their favourite bogeys of racism and “racist remarks,” the definition of which is ever expanding and elastic.

Error may not have rights, but these Muslims are sure taking a few liberties with the Danish consulate in Beirut.

Via Caymanian Compass
Photo: AP