“Courageous” attacks on underwear fall short

This is America, right? And in America, we have the absolute right under the First Amendment to make fun of anyone we want, including Christians, Jews, Atheists, Mormons, Scientologists, and Muslims. (Etc.)

Or am I wrong?

…the worrying thing is what the judge (Mark Martin) seems to have said at the trial, based on what appears to be a recording of the hearing: The judge — who stated that he (the judge) was himself a Muslim and found the speech to be offensive — spent a good deal of time berating the victim for what the judge saw as the victim’s offensive and blasphemous speech, which seems to raise a serious question about whether the judge’s acquittal of the defendant was actually partly caused by the judge’s disapproval of the victim. Consider, for instance, this statement, at 31:15:

Then what you have done is you have completely trashed [Muslim observers’] essence, their being. They find it very, very, very, offensive.

I’m a Muslim, I find it offensive. I find what’s on the other side of this [sign] very offensive. But you have that right, but you’re way outside your bounds of first amendment rights.

Since when is it “way outside” the First Amendment to say something that Muslims find offensive?

Sorry, but if I do not have just as much of a right to say something “offensive” to Muslims as I do Christians, then this is not the United States.

I’m not an insulting person and I don’t like insulting people, but as someone who has been insulted for much of my life, I say fuck the bastards if they can’t take an insult like the rest of us.

HT Glenn Reynolds, who was discussing the forces of selective tolerance.

(Or whatever we’re supposed to call the people who find Mormon underwear more threatening than “religious” fatwas against Salmon Rushdie, Jews, or against our right to say what we think.)