The case of the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammed is a difficult one. On the one hand, we liberals believe that church/mosque/synogogue and state must be separate, and that means that the state should not make laws that impose religious views on its citizens nor support religious groups or sects over non-religious groups or sects. This stems in part from our strong respect for individual liberties and in part from our strong suspicion of governmental interference in the decidedly personal realm of theological beliefs and personal preferences.
Similarly, a liberal understanding of democracy requires a strong press that is free to criticize and even make fun of people and groups in power and out, of any kind of political or religious or moral or other stripe. We believe that this liberal approach will protect the freedom of individuals to be different from their neighbors, their community or even their state, to have beliefs and form friendships that others may disagree with.
That freedom and respect, of course, is tempered, as all rights inevitably are, by the rights of others to the same kind of respect and freedom. Rights, in other words, also carry obligations--the obligation to respect others' freedoms being a significant one.
Although these principles are fairly easy to talk about, they are not simple to put into practice. The appropriate treatment of hate speech, in particular, has been an enormously difficult one for liberal, progressive theories. At some point, hate speech clearly impinges on the freedom of others to explore their own views and realize their own potentials through its categorizations and limitations that are sometimes then picked up and reflected in the opportunities afforded in society or even in violent repercussions against the victim of the hate speech. Hate speech is not respectful of others--in fact, its primary aim is to display disrespect for others. At what point, then, do we allow the state to intervene and put limitations on speech? There are profound disagreements among otherwise like-minded folks on this issue.
The display of cartoons in the Danish newspaper is even more problematic than typical examples of hate speech. The intent was clearly not, according to the cartoon editor, to demonstrate the way Christian or Jewish populations revile Muslim populations. It was not aimed at a particular person clearly involved in terrorist acts, but rather was intended as an exercise to test the limits of a free press. It was, he claims, a demonstration of the ability of journalists to cast a harsh light on any subject, to exercise to the fullest the scope of freedom of the press provided by a belief in the press as the keystone of a democratic polity. The editor noted the reluctance of publishers to display images of Muhammed, and decided to invite cartoonists to do so.
Papers that republished the cartoons expressed the same idea. Rich Oppel, editor of The Austin American-Statesman, stated: "It is one thing to respect other people's faith and religion, but it goes beyond where I wwould go to accept their taboos." (quoted in Stanley Fish, Our Faith in Letting It All Hang Out, Op-Ed in the Feb. 12, 2006 New York Times, at WK 15).
Yet this was "speech" that would undoubtedly have an inflamatory effect, speech that would be viewed by the people must vulnerable to its negative impact as depicting a disrespectful perspective, one that was intended to portray a negative judgment of a revered religious figure in a religious culture that considers such depictions blasphemy.
I remember seeing similar cartoons of Jews that were common in Nazi Germany--Jews as murderers of young children, as "bloodsuckers", as distorted evil beings that carried no concern for human life. Those cartoons were meant to denigrate an entire people based on their faith and to incite negative emotions that would permit the State machinery to take even more severe negative acts against that population. Ultimately, that led Hitler's Germany to accept its grotesque "final solution" to its purported "Jewish problem."
Would we permit those cartoons now, or say that they were merely an exercise in free speech? Wouldn't they, and these cartoons depicting Muhammed, equally fall within that category of "hate speech" that can be expected to incite negative views and even violence towards another population? Do they not so clearly marginalize their subject that they should not be protected speech?