Jonathan Turley points to an interesting case. The New York Times ran an ad from the Freedom From Religion Foundation that called upon liberal Catholics to leave their church, but refused to run another ad that made the same appeal to Muslims, apparently because “The fallout from running this ad now could put U.S. troops and/or civilians in the [Afghan] region in danger.”

I agree with Turley (who has not yet seen the anti-Islam ad) when he says:

I am not sure that we should start to restrict speech on the basis of content in fear of a response of extremists in other countries. That would appear to reward the violence and anti-speech conduct of such extremists. It is precisely what occurred after 2005 when a Danish newspaper published cartoons mocking the prophet Muhammad. The result were worldwide protests in which Muslims reportedly killed more than 100 people — a curious way to demonstrate religious tolerance. However, while newspapers swore allegiance to free press values, there was an obvious level of self-censorship to avoid pictures and cartoons of Muhammad and Islam in general. Even academic institutions like Yale University Press exhibited the same response.

The editors in this case promised that they would consider publishing the ad in a few months because “we publish this type of advertising, even those we disagree with, because we believe in the First Amendment.” However, that does not explain why they will yield to extremists in the interim.

For too long, some Muslims have been allowed to use the threat of violence to impose censorship on others. This has to end and major media institutions should be taking the lead on this and not leaving it to small and vulnerable media institutions.

There is an interesting case working its way through the European Court of Human Rights. It concerns whether Christians have the right to wear crucifixes to work. Two British women, one who worked for British Airways and the other a nurse, were told by their employers that their crosses did not conform to the uniforms that their professions required. The British government supports their employers, saying that wearing crosses is not a ‘requirement’ of the Christian faith, unlike the Sikh turban or the Muslim hijab, which have apparently been granted exemptions on those grounds. [Read more…]

Via Jonathan Turley, I learned that in Morocco, the penal code exempts a man from punishment for rape if he agrees to marry the victim! [Read more…]

You have to hand it to the Catholic Church. In their obsession with upholding their antiquated doctrines, they are willing to risk becoming even more irrelevant in this modern age. Their opposition to equal rights for homosexuals is long-standing and well known. What is truly surprising are recent developments in the US where they have chosen to go to the mat in vociferously opposing contraceptive services to women, a losing battle if there ever was one. [Read more…]

According to the London Independent newspaper, “President Hamid Karzai has backed guidelines issued by Afghanistan’s religious council that relegate women to the position of second-class citizens.” [Read more…]

I really like Pat Robertson. Whenever something major happens, he can be counted upon to unfailingly say the wrong thing. For example, most religious people think that prayer can nudge god into overcoming the laws of nature but they also have the sense that to blame deadly natural disasters on insufficient prayer, while being a perfectly logical consequence of that belief, may sound callous and be ridiculed, and so they refrain from doing so. [Read more…]

When it comes to religions, they all have such weird beliefs that comparing them to see which ones are more bizarre is futile. Can we really say that Scientology is crazier than Islam, Mormonism than Judaism? Bahaism than Christianity? How does one measure levels of craziness to enable such comparisons? And yet, people often do make just such judgments. [Read more…]

Last month I wrote about an article in Rolling Stone in which students, their parents and other adults, and even teachers and administrators of the Anoka-Hannepin school district in Minnesota [Read more…]