I’ve changed back to my regular header image, but je suis encore Charlie.

I’ve seen some people (like David Brooks and Glenn Greenwald) complain that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons were stupid, racist, and unfunny, and where was the outrage when someone or other published published an anti-Semitic cartoon?  This seems to me to miss the point.

A few years ago an atheist science blogger, P.Z. Myers, got hold of a Eucharist.  He dithered about what to do with it for while, and then finally he threw it in the trash with torn-up copies of the Koran and The God Delusion.  This was a childish stunt designed to make an obvious point.  But if he had been murdered by an enraged Catholic or Muslim (or, I suppose, Richard Dawkins), it changes from being a childish stunt to a fundamental issue of what we should be allowed to do and say in our society.  Most of us don’t go out of our way to offend people, but we need to stand up for people’s right to be offensive.