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.

LIFE ACCORDING TO THE TALIBAN - SHOOT 14-YEAR-OLD WHO INSULTS YOUR BELIEFS ON TREATMENT OF WOMEN

Declan Walsh covers the story in The New York Times today of the school girl in Pakistan, shot in the head at close range by members of Pakistan's Taliban, because they objected to her campaign for universal education for girls.

Members of the Taliban give the impression of being from an age of unenlightenment, hundreds of years ago, where, if you don't like what someone else says or thinks, you kill him or her, in this case, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai.