I didn't say anything specifically about free speech rights - I said first amendment rights. You are aware the first amendment to the US Constitution involves more than just free speech. It also provides protection against " impeding the free exercise of religion". Can not an argument be made that when publicly own facilities are used to promote hatred of a religion, the government is impeding the free exercise of that religion? I have no opposition to these ads themselves being placed on private buildings or other private facilities if the owners of those buildings/facilities want to be associated with the speech presented. That is entirely different from the ads being placed on public property, property that is partially owned and paid for by some who are being targeted in the ads.
The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]. The Supreme Court extended that ban to the states not long before World War II. What law is involved here?
Almost anyone can make almost any legal argument--the question is whether it would get anywhere in court. I don't see how this even comes close to fitting anything in the Supreme Court's free exercise jurisprudence. No one is firing a Muslim for following a practice his religion demands, and then denying him unemployment insurance. No zoning board is denying a mosque a building permit just like the ones it issues for other religious buildings.
And I strongly disagree that anything in those ads promotes "hatred of a religion." Since when is pointing out evils done in the name of Islam promoting hatred of Islam? HAMAS and CAIR
are part of the same Islamic supremacist effort--both are creations of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Mufti of Jerusalem
did hate Jews and
did directly help Hitler during WWII. The yellow SOB in those photos
did gruesomely murder the man he posed with.
If Muslims don't like getting called out for the atrocities some of them are committing, then let them do more to stop those things. And let people in the West realize that by being so determined to accommodate the exquisitely sensitive feelings of Muslims, they are serving as the Islamists' helpmates. Every time we change the way we do something to suit their liking, we are helping them impose their will and their way of life on us.
If they can make us trip over ourselves trying to keep them happy, they get their way without ever having to fire a shot. "Ha! The unbelievers are so decadent and weak that all we have to do, these days, is make a few angry scowls, raise our voices, and they start to grin and ask how they can please us!" If some cartoon offends them, or if they're peeved that we don't all just jump for joy at their plan to erect an enormous mosque near the site of the attack on the World Trade Center, that's just too damn bad. To hell with them.
