It started with criminalization in Germany of Holocaust denial, which has since spread.
Then after 9/11 the left demanded hate speech laws, allegedly necessary to protect minorities but vague enough to bash their enemies for crossing them on any number of policy matters.
Well, if you're going to do all that, why not criminalize mockery of Mohammed?
Or of figures significant to other religions?
The Buddha, Jesus, the Pope, Moses?
And then?
Anjem Choudary makes this argument, though not well, in passing.
Other Muslims have or no doubt will do better.
Meanwhile, some Christians and others have made it for him.
Bill Donohue.
Not that I would really miss Piss Christ.
But how long would it take for someone to claim such a law applies to Monty Python's deeply offensive and blasphemous Life of Brian?
Do we really want to go down that road?
But Europe has already started down it.
Still, legality apart, it's a good thing that public blasphemy and other deliberately offensive expression be generally frowned on and neither indulged not tolerated.
A necessity of social life among humans is that we not be forever provoking one another merely for the joy of provocation.
That was so before Islam arrived in the West and is so still today.
Hence my disapproval of the Republican senator who shouted "You lie!" at President Obama during a State of the Union speech.
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