By no stretch of the definition is this video ‘incitement’. Then again, we often hear that people are ‘asking for it’, when they become victims of violent and disgusting crimes.

Aside from completely avoiding my questions, you have not yet established how this is even remotely relevant to favor stamping out the First Amendment’s guarantee for free speech – simply because you don’t like the conclusions that people draw about Islam.

I also see no answer to my question whether Islam is hostile to women’s rights and prone to violence – you raise the issue and then leave it hanging in the air. Can you answer that?

And is it true or false that Islam promotes violence and the abuse of women? Kindly provide arguments for either position.

Mary: Challenges to mosque construction are becoming more frequent in the U.S.,

And it is good, too, that American citizens have the right to petition their government for redress of grievances. There is no particular reason that any other building could be challenged, but not a mosque.

Your priorities appear to be a bit off, as you condemn people who lawfully voice their opinions, but refrain from criticizing people who murder random people as a result of speech they don’t like. Your outrage is a bit misplaced.

Mary: This is why I say that the filmmaker’s freedom of speech is being used (or abused) in an effort to restrict freedom of worship.

Not true, you did not say used, you said that it was intended to infringe on “free worship”. Either would be untrue. Free speech means that people have the right to voice their opinions, and that critics have the right to criticize those ideas. When the Koran gives men the right to beat their wives, it is perfectly legitimate to point this out, regardless of whether people find it convenient to hear.

Please note the following:

Washington — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton condemned an anti-Islam film that has spurred protests across the Middle East, saying, “this video is disgusting and reprehensible.”

“It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage,” Clinton said in remarks at the start of the U.S.-Morocco Strategic Dialogue in Washington September 13.

Also this:

Mitt Romney strongly denounced an anti-Muslim film linked to riots against U.S. diplomatic compounds in the Mideast on Thursday, accusing its director of wrongly offending Islamic sensibilities. His comments appeared to move him in line with the White House’s own position.

Romney told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that while he had not seen the film himself, he knew enough to declare it a “very bad thing.”

“You know, I think it’s dispiriting sometimes to see some of the awful things people say,” Romney said. “And the idea of using something that some people consider sacred and then parading that out a negative way is simply inappropriate and wrong. And I wish people wouldn’t do it.”

Romney said that the film is clearly legal under the Constitution. . . .

The Republican nominee also condemned Florida pastor Terry Jones, whose burning of a Koran sparked deadly attacks abroad in 2011, for promoting the film.

“I think the whole film is a terrible idea,” he said. “I think him making it, promoting it showing it is disrespectful to people of other faiths. I don’t think that should happen. I think people should have the common courtesy and judgment —- the good judgment — not to be — not to offend other peoples’ faiths. It’s a very bad thing, I think, this guy’s doing.”

And this:

U.S. Says It Also Finds Cartoons of Muhammad Offensive [February 4, 2006]

WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 — The Muslim world erupted in anger on Friday over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in Europe while the Bush administration offered the protesters support, saying of the cartoons, “We find them offensive, and we certainly understand why Muslims would find these images offensive.” . . .

The State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, reading the government’s statement on the controversy, said, “Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images,” which are routinely published in the Arab press, “as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief.”

Still, the United States defended the right of the Danish and French newspapers to publish the cartoons. “We vigorously defend the right of individuals to express points of view,” Mr. McCormack added. . . .

It is simply not true that government officials must remain mum about the content of protected speech that is reprehensible or disgusting.

I included the Scalia video, first, because it was amusing, but second, because some people seem to imply that because the anti-Muslim video is (as far as we know) constitutionally protected speech, that somehow legitimizes it and exempts it from criticism. And you yourself claim that makes it exempt from criticism by government officials. I simply think you are wrong there.

The right to free speech can be abused and in fact is abused all the time. We in America feel strongly that it is better to live with the abuses than to allow government to suppress speech. However, that does not muzzle anyone, including government officials, who want to criticize the content of any given instance of protected speech.

As I said, I am close to being a free speech absolutist. I think the United States should always make it clear that the right to freedom of speech is an American value. However, I certainly don’t think we should give the impression that it is the highest, or the only, American value, or that people exercising the right to free speech are necessarily doing something good. As Scalia says, sometimes they are idiots.

You do realize that when asked if Terry Jones burning a Koran justified the suppression of free speech rights Scalia says clearly “no.” That he defends free speech rights of the manner almost exactly like that exercised by the filmmaker in question. How do you understand this as a vindication of the Cairo Embassy statement?

You seem to be making an odd leap here. You seem to equate what Scalia says — that there is nothing wrong with calling an idiot an idiot with what the embassy spokesman in Cairo did. They are not in any way analogous. One is free speech by a private citizen. The other is the diplomatic speech of a representative of the US Government. The Cairo embassy should have simply abstained from comment on the film, period. It is bad precedent at the very least.

Scalia is quite clear. The free speech rights of any citizen may not be abridged by the government in all but the case of incitement. And lest you think that this is what we have in this current case the test (from Brandenburg v. Ohio) is “incitement to imminent lawless action” — in other words, there needs to be direct causative relationship, with the speech in question directly linked to – and intending to cause – the ensuing lawless activity (in this country), for the standard to apply.

In the words of Horatius: they who, having no freedom of their own, come to take away the freedom of others.