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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (121650)	9/23/2012 12:03:05 PM
From: Mac Con Ulaidh	Respond to of 149317

For me, the right to free speech very much includes blasphemy. I reach that feeling a lot for historical reasons. A big part of why freedom of religion and free speech were important parts of our beginning here is because of the history of the people who came here. Freedom of speech is two-fold around religion and monarchs. People had been through hundreds of years of religious wars. Been through having the Church of Rome and state religions rule their lives. To go against the orthodoxy, in word or practice, could mean death. Some of James Madison's best writing, imo, was when Virginia was considering establishing a state church. At that time, also, Baptists were persecuted there and jailed for preaching their faith, which differed from the Anglican church. For one thing, Chinu, I don't think we do ourselves any good by curtailing people from speaking, and we don't do the Coptics and the Shias and others in those countries any good. The Shias in Libya have been under siege since the revolution there, as they have been for ages in Saudi Arabia. Something as crude and offensive as that movie apparently is (I haven't watched the trailer) does have the thing of bringing this subject forth. And a song - youtube.com Also, for personal history - my maternal grandfather's family had a member killed, another enslaved on a ship, and the rest run out of France with nothing for the sin of being Huguenots, considered blasphemous by Catholics. On the maternal g'mom side, they left Virginia for a better place to be a Baptist. The right to express yourself is mostly of value to minority religions.