Lindsey Graham: Open Mouth Insert Foot Syndrome

Lindsey Graham, the senior senator from South Carolina, has called on limits to the First Amendment. This is mainly due to actions taking by Pastor Terry Jones, the Florida evangelist who has burned the Koran to what was mainly no media coverage of it. “I wish we could find some way to hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war. During World War II, you had limits on what you could do if it inspired the enemy. Burning a Koran is a terrible thing, but it doesn’t justify killing someone,” Graham said on Face The Nation last Sunday in response to the killing of dozens of people in Afghanistan as a result of Jones’ actions.

The only problem with this statement is, well everything. First, we are not in a war, unless Congress passed some super-secret resolution and never bothered to tell the rest of us. Only Congress has the power to officially declare war and they haven’t done that since World War 2. Every so called war since then has been the equivalent of Obama’s “kinetic military option” or whatever euphuism the current administration uses to justify their actions. We might as well call the next one “The Saudi Slap fight,” or “Yemen’s Eye Poke” for all the accuracy these statements have. So unless we actually declare war Lindsey, the First Amendment should stand.

Horrific speech is exactly why we have that amendment in the first place. If we have to cover our ears every time someone says something we don’t like, they are going to be permanently glued to our head. Especially every time Glenn Beck speaks.
We can all agree that what Pastor Jones was stupid. But the great thing about living in a free country is that we have the right to do stupid things like that. We also have the right to not listen. The US media actually did the right thing by not advertising it. So how did a bunch of inbred morons half a world away find out about it? Hamid Karzai.

Yes, the current Afghanistan president thought it a great idea to announce to his people that some fringe idiot that America overwhelmingly denounced as an idiot had gone through with his threats to burn a Koran. And as a result, the religious wingnuts that every country seems to possess these days in spades, rose up and killed dozens of innocent people. The worst part of all this is that they proved Pastor Jones point.

We cannot live in a free society where we have to walk on eggshells every time somebody insults a religious figure, accurate or not. As someone who has close ties to European friends and family, Muslims are becoming persona no grata in many areas. The fact that current leaders in both France and England have publically said exactly that is not good news for any Muslim person worldwide. Muslims in general are a kind and generous people. It’s too bad that the extremists are the ones who get all the press. Maybe they should take a look at how we handle our kooks and do the same. The alternative will not be pretty.