The question raised by the Danish cartoons is whether reasonable people should choose to show a cartoon deliberately blaspheming Islam. Really, it is about the status of Islam — how important we think it is.

Another part of the First Amendment is freedom of religion. Legally, this is about freedom from the government. Again, there is a cultural side dish: In America we make religious freedom work by not attacking the other fellow’s beliefs.

That is what those cartoons do. The believer thinks it’s a sin to picture Muhammad, and we do it anyway and say, “Hey! Get a load of this.”

It is not the drawing alone. A sketch of a bearded man with a bomb in his turban is fine. You may imply he’s a Muslim, and that’s OK. Say it’s the prophet, and you insult 1.5 billion believers.

None of this means it is OK to stir up a riot and burn down a foreign consulate. It’s not, the West has said it is not, and even the spokesman for Hamas asked people not to do it. Nor does it mean the press has to bow to every person who has his feelings hurt, or else discussion would end.

It does mean that citing freedom of speech is not enough. There has to be judgment. Not censorship, which is what government does, but judgment, which is that cultural side dish that goes along with free speech. ~Bruce Ramsey

Via Antiwar.

Apparently reasonable people did choose to show cartoons “blaspheming” Muhammad, unless we want to declare everyone who has republished them to be ipso facto unreasonable. Apparently the cartoonists and publishers thought the right to express some opinion, whatever its quality, was guaranteed by Danish law (which it is) and that this was more important to them than Islam, a religion to which none of them (so far as we know) belongs. For them, as for most of us, Islam is not very important, or rather it is not very meaningful. It is important in obvious geopolitical and demographic senses, and most of the appeals to repudiate these cartoons and their publication rest on the idea that we shouldn’t upset Muslims because of the potential geopolitical consequences.

This is a classic example of what Richard Weaver called an argument from circumstance, as opposed to an argument from principle (even if he himself used this distinction rather oddly): of course we ought to defend free speech as a matter of principle, these folks might say, but not in this case, because it will cause us too many problems in Iraq or elsewhere. Best to lie low, they tell us.

Besides, all of that was in poor taste and lacked good judgement. So what if it was, and so what if it did? Instead of chiding the offenders for what we regard as poor taste and bad judgement but defending the principle, in which we all have some general stake, we want to throw the people who lacked the proper discretion to the wolves, figuratively speaking, without further comment? This is a strange response indeed.

There has been much talk of good taste and judgement surrounding these cartoons in the last couple of weeks. Without denying that these are generally desirable and are what distinguish intelligent discourse from the idiotic rambling that takes place at, say, FreeRepublic.com, I do not begrudge the semi-literate and incoherent from their right to express themselves, in spite of the fact that their statements clutter the air and the Internet with endless streams of far more poisonous garbage than any cartoons published in the Jyllands-Posten. How much more do I think European newspapers were justified in publishing these cartoons!

There is a certain sense of austere disapproval of populist expressions that are just a little too vulgar in some American commentary on the cartoon controversy. Without wanting to praise vulgarity and ignorant political sentiments, they are part and parcel of democratic politics to have them (if poor judgement were the criterion for remaining silent, most of the GOP today would not be allowed to speak in public on foreign policy). This is one reason why I actually find democracy repugnant in practise and in theory, but I also recognise that “good taste” and “judgement” are words that the commentariat elite in this country are using to cover their acceptance of the drive to limit and suppress free expression in Europe. Yes, let us have free speech, they’ll say, but only as long as it is in good taste. But, I’m sorry to say, you gave up on standards of good taste the moment you empowered the Common Man.

In other words, you shouldn’t have genuinely free speech, because that is quite dangerous and potentially shockingly crude. That has always been the risk in granting some fictive sovereignty to every man and telling him that he has these profound “rights”: he will then go out and use them with the full expectation that he is actually entitled to do so. Little did he realise that his self-appointed betters in another country would rebuke him when he drew a cartoon that some tiny minority of his countrymen found offensive to their religion.