And if those riots attack our embassies, that’s a matter for the military to sort out.

Even more, if Mormons started to act violently, no one would hesitate one nanosecond to support free speech, instead of blasting how horribly “offensive” the Book of Mormon was. And they certainly would not say that since Mormons have decided to react violently, any further speech is “irresponsible” – like the UN’s Human Rights Commissioner (what human rights is this Pillay upholding?).

And Mormons would condemn the act immediately and without prompting, instead of incessantly complaining about the “offense”, and they wouldn’t say “we condemn both the violence and the movie”. They would unequivocally condemn the violence, period.

It’s incredible that withholding taxpayer money would be conflated with censorshop but that’s the thinking that our nanny state has fostered. Actually the real problem is government sponsoring political art period! They should sponsor neither conservative nor liberal political expressions.

What’s so troubling is this “soft bigotry of low expectations” in which Muslims are not expected to act like adults. Does anyone seriously expect a Mormon backlash to the offensive “Book of Mormon” play? It really takes courage to offend those violent Mormons, huh?

Mike Melendez,

I see. So when a private citizen makes a film designed to provoke, distributes it with the help of foreigners to the various powder kegs of the world, and people get killed as a result, the First Amendment is all important. But when the issue is “Don’t use my tax money to display something offensive to me,” the First Amendment can be ignored. That is not what the federal judge said to Giuliani:

Delivering a ringing endorsement of the First Amendment as well as a stinging rebuke to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Federal Judge Nina Gershon ruled yesterday that Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to punish the Brooklyn Museum of Art for mounting a controversial display of modern art had violated the Constitution. ”There is no federal constitutional issue more grave,” she wrote, ”than the effort by government officials to censor works of expression and to threaten the vitality of a major cultural institution as punishment for failing to abide by governmental demands for orthodoxy.” She then ordered the mayor to resume city payments to the museum and end his campaign to evict the museum from city land and to fire its board of trustees.

Either the First Amendment is fundamental, or it’s not. It can’t be used to defend speech that offends Muslims and be ignored when there’s speech that offends Christians—particularly exemplary Catholics like Rudy Giuliani.

Imagine that the video in question had been done with government funding from any level of government. That might place the issue in a different perspective.

I’ve also read the nonsense that the video was equivalent to yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. Where did all the arguments that movies don’t make people do things in real life go? You might remember them. They are used to justify the vivid depiction of violence in movies.

yes, that all-out war was really devastating. I knew something was up when the first IEDs went off. I felt so helpless watching the NY brigades hit the museum with mortar rounds—all that art, burned to cinders. it was awful when Guiliani tortured and killed the museum director and his HR staff. That was bad.

But speech does not need to be explicitly ‘protected’ to be legal. The Supreme Court has allowed criminalization of speech that is akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater, it has not mandated it. If she were right, which she is not, it only means that a legislature could constitutionally pass a law banning this expression.

The Supreme Court long ago (1969) significantly refined Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “clear and present danger” test — the majority opinion of which establisheded the “fire in a crowded theater” meme (Schenk 1919) with the stricter “imminent lawless action” test of Brandenurg v. Ohio. This test says the for speech not to be protected it must be proven that the speaker was 1) “intentionally” promoting 2) “lawless action” 3) “imminently” (usually defined as the amount of time it would reasonably take for law enforcement to arrive on the scene).

As others have noted — thankfully Sarah Chayes is not even close to offering a constitutional argument for suppressing free speech… But then this should not surprise us given that her former boss (the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs) thought it entirely appropriate for the highest ranking military officer in the land to call a private citizen and pressure him into not promoting the video in question.