Summary: Fox’s Jeanine Pirro predicts Sharia law will replace the First Amendment.
Was Pam Geller’s event, rallying cartoonists to satirize Muslim prophet Muhammad, an act considered by many Muslims to be blasphemy, going too far? No, not really, not if you regard free speech as expressed in the first amendment to be a categorical right, rather than a right one upholds and defends when “free” speech is nice and kind. Yet Fox’s Judge Jeanine Pirro looks at the Geller event, which attempted to be a repeat of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, as a harbinger of First Amendment doom.
“For the first time I’m worried about whether or not the president’s so-called politically correct culture will restrict our free speech in line with Sharia requirements,” she said, making one wonder who is doing the “so-calling” here.
“I have long predicted this administration will cut back our speech if it offends Islam,” Pirro said. “As sure as I’m talking to you, there will be efforts to limit our First Amendment, our free speech, to comply with Sharia blasphemy laws, which call for death to those who slander the prophet Muhammad. Imagine, a nation founded on Judeo-Christian ethics changing the rules for a Muslim prophet!”
Again, it is perplexing that “freedom of speech,” so famously backed by the likes of Voltaire and other deists and atheists, is so quickly attributed to the Judeo-Christian aspects of our tradition, rather than the Greco-Roman threading of our culture.
“The First Amendment, besides giving us freedom of speech, says that Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion,” Pirro continued. “Which means I don’t have to live under any religious rule, especially one that tells me not to criticize someone else’s prophet.”
Certainly this is true, and suggests the point in legal talk where principle and value usurps any talk of law and politics.