SPEECH AND IDEAS ARE PROTECTED LIBERTIES

Remember back in grade school, someone would say to you, your mother is a xxxx!  And then you tried to beat him up!

Children naturally take words over-seriously, not knowing that freedom of speech allows a person to say almost anything he wants, including, your mother is a . . . . !

Actually, freedom of speech flows out of freedom of ideas.  This is a connection that the Catholic Church has never understood.  It tries to make certain thoughts, "sinful."  Maybe, the priests succeeded in convincing people that this was the case for the first 1700 years of Christianity, but then came the French Enlightenment, and the idea that ideas could be sinful or harmful was tossed on the dung heap of discredited belief.

It is amazing to think that words still are the basis for hurting or killing people.   Or that insults should be met with a gun or a sword, especially when the insults are imagined as being directed to a religious prophet.