"We Are All Blasphemers": Greg Lukianoff's Response To Eric Posner
Eric Posner is the law prof whose disgusting Slate piece about how we should have less free speech I blogged this morning.

I explained:

Of course, the problem isn't free speech; it's the violence-commanding totalitarian system (pretending to be a religion) known as Islam.

We speak freely in America and say all sorts of offensive things -- about Jews, Christians, and Kim Kardashian's butt. Jews, Christians, and Kim Kardashian do not go around sodomizing and murdering foreign ambassadors in response. Or anyone.

Now, Greg Lukianoff, the First Amendment Lawyer who is president of FIRE -- the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education -- which defends people on college campuses whos civil liberties are violated, has written a response to Posner's on the Huff Po. An excerpt:

For those of us who work in First Amendment law, Posner relies on pretty tired arguments that I plan to address piece by piece in upcoming posts. But before I get too entangled in the details of what was so wrong about Professor Posner had to say, it's important to take a step back and realize why punishing a citizen for offending a religion is so dangerous.

As I alluded to earlier, at our founding, the United States understood that nothing can more savagely divide people than a government that is allowed to pick a side in a battle of faith and to punish you for what you believe. In this case, it can be hard to see the value in that YouTube video and Posner claims it has none. But what the video is essentially saying is that "I don't think what your faith believes is true or even worthy of respect."

Now, saying that may seem like a harsh sentiment in our comfortable society, but we are quick to forget that all of us hold beliefs that are rejections of sacred cows of the past, present, or future. If you reject that women are unclean once a month, eat pork or beef, don't believe in the harm of "graven images," or think intervening angels are either real or a superstition, you are running afoul of some religious doctrine.

The brilliance of our system is that we placed freedom of speech, the free exercise of religion, and the freedom from established religion in the same clause. In one sentence, the Bill of Rights attempted to eliminate some of the most consistent reasons for particularly brutal bloodshed in human history.

It was a huge victory for genuine multiculturalism, diversity, religious tolerance, and pluralism. It is not generally considered a problem that everyone in our country does not agree on matters of faith. But if we start punishing people in the United States because they've offended the beliefs of people of other faiths, we will have put the United States government in the role of enforcer of a religious norm. Worse still, we will have put the United States government in the position of essentially encouraging violent reactions to speech by promising to punish blasphemers if, but only if, true believers are willing to actually get violent.

This is an obscene incentive that promises only more violence.

No one should be more concerned about the rise of blasphemy laws in the United States than American Muslims. This fact was powerfully brought home to me by a student who came up to me after a speech I gave at Indiana University. He said he was extremely excited and in agreement with nearly everything I had to say about defending free speech on college campuses, but thought that surely we could agree that blasphemy should be punished.

By blasphemy, he meant speech that was offensive to Islam. I was floored by his belief that blasphemy could function as some small, manageable exception to our national guarantee of freedom of expression and belief.

When it comes down to it, the right to express your religious views or the right to have no religious views at all is the first freedom. In a sense, it even precedes the founding of our country because the compromises that led to the end of the religious wars in Europe necessarily included the ancient ancestor of what we know today as the right of private conscience.

But there was another reason why I was so stunned by this Muslim student's asking for blasphemy laws. He didn't seem to understand that America is a majority Christian country, and therefore not believing that Jesus is the son of God and instead believing that Mohammed is Allah's prophet is textbook blasphemy by majority standards.

...It's become easy for American academics, elites and contrarians to scoff at the universal values of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from imposed beliefs. But while America may be almost alone as a nation in being relatively purist about these doctrines, this does not mean we are wrong. A nation and even a world where it's safe for people to believe as they choose--or not to believe at all--is one worth aspiring towards.

Please pre-order Greg's inspiring and beautifully written book, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, which I am now reading an advance copy of, and highly recommend.