Taking a radical right-wing position on the part of an outgroup is not "liberalism."

[True Blue Door]

69. There's a massive difference between calling someone a racial slur

and simply choosing not to observe someone else's religious taboos.

Granted, most of the images drawn at an event sponsored by those assholes would probably be deliberately racist and bigoted. But said assholes wouldn't be doing it if the other assholes weren't threatening to kill them if they did.

And that oppositional element of the "Doing whatever you're told not to do under threat" is something I understand profoundly. Call it what you will, but when someone tells me not to do something that is my right, and threatens me, I passionately desire to not only do that thing, but to go well beyond it and rub their faces in it. I know it's idiotic, but it's one of the roots of my liberal values - the absolute contempt for bullies.

If the Texas people were just being dicks for the sake of it, insulting a minority religion just because, and people of the religion responded peacefully and assertively, then I would see the Texans as the bullies for being hateful even if only symbolically. But their response to credible threats of murder was drawing pictures, so I have to begrudgingly call that element of their behavior (cartooning) a valid moral stand regardless of its core motives.

In time, people with common sense will not want to hurt Moslems by insulting their Prophet. I hope the time passes quickly before the accusations against ALL of them turns them all into radicals and it would be our own fault for taking the side of the free speech defenders no matter how hurtful the free speech may be to some..

This is a secular country with Constitutional freedom of religion. We as a whole nation are more than willing to defend it to the death against anyone who would change that by force, foreign or domestic, on behalf of extremist religious tyranny. Short of that, anyone who chooses to respond to threats against Muhammed cartoonists by becoming one, has a right to do so and a right to defend and be defended. There is no right to not be offended. Not on anyone's part. Not in a free society.

The fact that many foreign Muslims are so sensitive to this (American Muslims seem much better at handling it) is because Muslim countries punish it as a crime, and plenty of them punish it with death. If they come to a country where that is not the case, they have to adapt. We are not here to adapt to the undemocratic, illiberal ideologies they fled to get here. Either someone is on board with the basic tenets of liberal democracy or they are not, and if they are not, that person needs to leave and return to a country where their views are practiced.

Free speech is not a custom of this country, it is this country. So there will be no accommodations on this point: Everyone who wants to will draw Muhammed, as respectfully or as grotesquely as they please, and those offended by it may protest and speak their own piece, draw their own caricatures, hold their own peaceful events, and that's it. That's what happens in a freedom-loving society, and that's the only state of affairs we will tolerate. American Muslims seem to be okay with that in general, even though it irks them. They can irk the cartoonists right back in similar form. There are plenty of buttons to push to piss off a Texas Republican.