A double standard on the right to insult?

Submitted by Darwin P. Moradiellos (United States), Feb 7, 2006 at 19:45

It is all well and good to defend insults as an exercise in free speech, but I know darn good and well that the same people who are defending the anti-Moslem cartoons would not defend a cartoon denying the Holocaust, or insulting the late Rev. Martin Luther King, etc. In the latter cases, the present defenders of freedom of speech would be figuratively devouring the offending cartoonists, as well as the paper who published them. Where were the defenders of free speech when Rush Limbaugh was trashed for his comments re Donovan McNab on a sports program?

There is a tremendous amount of hypocrisy on the subject of free speech. As for myself, I do not believe that the U.S. Constitution protects the right to commit a verbal assault any more than a physical assault.

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