“Freedom of speech shouldn’t give you the right to insult people’s religions.”
Since the Charlie Hebdo attack, such figures as Pope Francis have come out with the argument that freedom of speech does not encompass the right to criticize other people's religions or to engage in what another faith considers blasphemous. Fincke is right to point out that freedom of speech not only does but must encompass this right. If racially or ethnically offensive hate speech receives protection in a free country, so too much speech that is offensive to people on religious grounds.
That said, to defend a legal or constitutional right to engage in offensive speech is not the same thing as to say that such speech is in and of itself right. Moreover, in both racial and religious contexts (which, in the case of the depiction of Muslims in Western media, often overlap), the line between offensive speech and an outright threat cannot always be drawn with certainty.
Let us take one example more familiar to American audiences: the practice of cross-burning by the Ku Klux Klan. Cross burning is clearly offensive to African-Americans in the United States in no small part because of its frequent use as an intimidation tactic. The extent to which the practice is constitutionally protected depends a great deal on the circumstances in which a cross is burned. When the Klan (or other hate groups) place a cross on someone's lawn in order to intimidate him or her into accepting white supremacy, this is not "speech" but merely a threat, does not receive constitutional protection, is rightly regarded by most Americans today as odious. When performed as part of Klan ceremonies, away from the eyes of people who would perceive it as a threat, cross burning has received, and should receive, constitutional protection.
But is there a middle ground between these two situations? And if so, what should be done in such instances? What would we make of it if a local Klan group decided to put a burning across atop a car and parade through town with it? One could not call this an act of intimidation against a specific individual in the same manner as a cross burning on someone's lawn, but intimidation is nonetheless the clear message of such an act: its message is "Blacks, and supporters of Black people's rights, beware." I would argue that such conduct does not constitute speech and does not merit constitutional protection; one does not have a right to intimidate a whole class of people any more than one has a right to intimidate an individual.
How does this apply to the situation of Muslims who see cartoons as offensive as those recently printed in Charlie Hebdo? To many Muslims, grotesque depictions of the Prophet Mohammed are not simply mockery of their religious beliefs but attacks upon them. Their purpose is viewed not merely as satirizing religious figures but as an attempt to make all Muslims seem narrow-minded, backward, bigoted, Other, and by extension to make exclusion of Muslims from the body politic seem justifiable. Charlie Hebdo has published cartoons satirizing Mohammed in the context of a wider French and European culture that has seen a spike of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment in recent years. Controversies concerning the wearing of the veil in French public schools are the obvious case in point. While French secularists may see laws prohibiting religious garments in schools as necessary to protect a cherished principle of laicite, France's Muslims see the same laws--often selectively applied only against them--as attacks on their ethnic identities and, in the case of female students donning the veil, as attacks on their notions of modesty. This context makes the line between insult of a religion's belief or of major religious figures and advocacy of discrimination against a religion's adherents much harder to draw.
In the end, one can affirm the principle of freedom of speech while maintaining that some instances of speech are grotesque, gratuitously insulting, and unworthy of responsible and enlightened discourse. To say so is not to give in to terrorism.
“Even if we should honor the legal right to blaspheme, it’s still morally inappropriate for being so disrespectful.”
This argument--substantially similar to the one I made in the above entry--has come to be a focus of discourse around the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Fincke deals with it by arguing, in essence, that the right to satirize is sacrosanct--that they "play a vital role in puncturing the air of reverence around religious figures." Comedy and satire do not have a moral obligation to avoid the topic of religion altogether, but the line between satire of a religious figure and demonization of an entire religious tradition is blurry at best. Where does satirizing racism, sexism, or Islamophobia end and engaging in actual racism, sexism, or Islamophobia begin?
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