Anew.

A map of the world that does not include Utopia
is not even worth glancing at.

OSCAR WILDE

Freedom to hate.

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.*

In 2004, James Nixon, a twelve-year-old boy in Ohio, won the right in court to wear a T-shirt to school bearing the words ‘Homosexuality is a sin, Islam is a lie, abortion is murder. Some issues are just black and white!’ The school told him not to wear the T-shirt—and the boy’s parents sued the school. The parents might have had a conscionable case if they had based it on the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. But they didn’t: indeed they couldn’t, because free speech is deemed not to include ‘hate speech’. But hate only has to prove it is religious, and it no longer counts as hate. So, instead of freedom of speech, the Nixon’s lawyers appealed to the constitutional right to freedom of religion. Their victorious lawsuit was supported by the Alliance Defense Fund of Arizona, whose business it is to ‘press the legal battle for religious freedom’.

RICHARD DAWKINS, The God Delusion

Internet Infidels

*Robert M. Pirsig