Protecting the right to provoke

Okay, now on to McCarthy's piece. "While there is never a whisper of complaint about the savagery of Islamists who kill — who brazenly declare the right to kill — over trivial slights, the president spares no indignant syllable in condemning free expression. The contrast is stark. Its inevitable effect is to immunize the marauders. This only intensifies the danger to Nakoula (whose movie no one would ever have heard of absent Obama’s promotional campaign) and to Americans who lawfully grapple with a threat over which the administration prefers to slobber — the ideology rooted in Islamic scripture that has led to the killings of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of people (many of them Muslims) worldwide."

"There is nothing new about crass provocation being passed off as art. What is new, and perilous, is the notion that it has become government’s place to condemn free expression, and based not on community standards of decency but on the political tastes of government officials. Government’s only proper role here is to protect the right to provoke. When government’s coercive power is put in the service of the heckler’s veto, when it becomes the “ad hoc nullification machine” by which corrupt officials smother constitutional protections that inconvenience their cronies, then that government is no longer legitimate."

Read more here:  http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/10/18/its-not-just-obamas-lies-its-the-premise-of-obamas-lies/?singlepage=true