Sensible article in The Independent, by one Johann Hari, about craven submission to religious fanatics:
…a free society cannot be structured to soothe the hardcore faithful. It is based on a deal. You have an absolute right to voice your beliefs – but the price is that I too have a right to respond as I wish. Neither of us can set aside the rules and demand to be protected from offence.
Yet this idea – at the heart of the Universal Declaration – is being lost. To the right, it thwacks into apologists for religious censorship; to the left, it dissolves in multiculturalism. The hijacking of the UN Special Rapporteur by religious fanatics should jolt us into rescuing the simple, battered idea disintegrating in the middle: the equal, indivisible human right to speak freely.
I’m not usually much of a fan of the Independent (it has always seemed to me to be the paper for champagne-socialists who now feel that they are too staid and elderly for the Grauniad) but this sort of thing deserves a decent mark.
[...] I believe the piece in question was the one I mentioned earlier. [...]