Defacto?

Oh... joy. I knew Styen would have something depressing to say, and boy was I right.

here he is via via Ed Driscoll Talking about the latest de facto state religion.

Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in.

Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? As Diana West wrote, why was it necessary or even seemly to make this pastor a non-person? Another one of Obama’s famous “teaching moments”? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the President, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where’s the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones’ First Amendment rights?

True liberty requires the realization that others will use it to do things that you find offensive and repellant. I'm talking about things that do not hurt anyone else or infringe on another's rights, like say burning your own property, or writing a book critical of a group. Free people will do things that go against your religion and your core convictions.

That's just how things are.

If you try to "correct" this. If you use speech codes and such to enforce niceness... then you have a place where offensive speech and blasphemous acts are not covered by free speech.

From there you do not have freedom of thought and expression.

Go theocratic statism. Either a state religion or a religion of state it's all the same.