Pastor Jones, the Koran, and the rest of us

Last summer, I wrote an essay in BSR defending the Reverend Terry Jones's right to burn a copy of the Koran. He thought the better of it and stayed his hand at the time. Now, after a mock trial condemning the Koran at which he played judge and executioner, the Florida minister has soaked his personal copy in kerosene and set it aflame.

Burning the Koran was Jones's way of expressing his opinion about it. Not all opinions are equally worthy of respect, but they're all entitled to expression, providing they break no civil law— and, as Thoreau pointed out, sometimes when they do. Thoreau paid for his opinion with a night in jail. Jones broke no law, so the maximum penalty he faces is social ostracism.

Some people will say that Jones is ethically if not legally culpable, because he has knowingly put American soldiers and civilians at risk in Afghanistan and elsewhere by his behavior. Innocent bystanders have also suffered. At this writing, four days of rioting in Afghanistan have produced 22 fatalities.

That, some would say, is too high a price to pay for free expression. No one, after all, has the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater.

Blame the imams

Afghanistan, though, is not a crowded theater— merely a theater of war. No one really has a choice about trying to escape a burning theater. Everyone has a choice about whether or not to react violently to an event half a world away that physically imperils no one.

If anyone is directly to blame for the riots, apart from the rioters, it's the local imams who, instead of counseling restraint, urged their congregations on to violence instead.

Maybe that was part of what the Reverend Jones wanted. Maybe he wanted to show that Islam was a religion of hatred and intolerance by provoking just such a reaction as occurred.

I don't know what was actually inside his head, and I wouldn't spend the 15 seconds it might take to figure it out for all the world. To say that Jones is a moron and a bigot is to make the best case for him. If he intended the harm he caused, he certainly bears some moral responsibility for it. That harm is less than the rioters do, but it's not insubstantial.

"'Kill the Jews'

All of this, however, is not to the point. Free speech is often "irresponsible," not to say hateful and offensive in the extreme. We tolerate it nonetheless, and we should.

"Pass the salt" is not free speech, and requires no protection. "Kill the Jews," to choose an example that might negatively affect me in particular, is free speech— that is, speech one may feel a gut instinct not only to reject but to prohibit.

I don't know whether prohibiting such speech would make the conduct it wishes to promote more or less likely. I do know it would make the society that banned it less free.

"'We're in a war'

Responding to the Reverend Jones, the South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham says, "Free speech is a great idea, but we're in a war." I would rephrase the Senator's comment thusly: "Free speech is a great idea, especially in a war."

Just as free speech is free in proportion to the ways it may offend, so dissent is never more timely than when the powers that be demand uniformity.

By the law of unintended consequences, it may well be that the Reverend Jones will indeed make it more difficult to pursue our military adventure in Afghanistan, as well as the one we're just undertaking now in Libya. It may make it more difficult for us to retain a military presence in Iraq, or anywhere else in the Muslim world. That would suit me fine personally, as well as save all of us some tax dollars and body bags.

Good sometimes comes from evil. Sometimes it even comes from stupidity.♦


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