Columnist Ross Douthat, a conservative Catholic, has an interesting and nuanced take on the Charlie Hebdo attacks, how purposefully offensive speech is wrong–and yet, if someone threatens to murder a person over it, that speech becomes something good, something that deserves defending.
You need to read the whole column, including Mr. Douthat’s points about why we should NOT generally offend people, but here is a key paragraph:
The kind of blasphemy that Charlie Hebdo engaged in had deadly consequences, as everyone knew it could … and that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be defended, because it’s the kind that clearly serves a free society’s greater good. If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn’t really a liberal civilization any more. Again, liberalism doesn’t depend on everyone offending everyone else all the time, and it’s okay to prefer a society where offense for its own sake is limited rather than pervasive. But when offenses are policed by murder, that’s when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.
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