Look at that face! Just look at it! Is this the “face of the First Amendment”? It could be, shocking as it seems, unless the constantly debated Amendment receives a makeover in clarification.
If you’re enjoying a traditional Easter today, then you’ve been to a church of some sort, and are having a family dinner later on while the kids run around looking for Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies. You aren’t planning to burn the Koran/Quran or stand outside of a mosque and yell at Islam, are you?
No. That would not be very nice to guilt-by-association Muslims living in America, and others throughout the world, and as a religious person, such incendiary acts are so very not “right” in a moral way, you wouldn’t be doing any of that madness.
Unless you are “Pastor” Terry Jones (above) of some little church in ‘someplace Florida’ USA who has done all of that. Not smart or nice, especially for a supposed “man of the cloth.” From what I’ve been reading, he’s more a man of the bike – Harley, that is. Who knew? That glum–looking guy with the Wild West mustache usually wearing a cheap suit also wears biker t-shirts and black leather jackets. Somehow this knowledge has changed my view of him from a slightly-off-balanced-megalomaniac to a guy who had too much LSD way-back-then.
Although I don’t like what Jones has done, in fact I’d kick him out of the country if I could, or what he stands for = religious intolerance, cultural ignorance, and his in-your-face-by-TV-proxy presence every few months, the First Amendment issue surrounding what he has done and may continue to do is a genuine legal conundrum.
The below snippet provides new information:
The Huffington Post and Jessica Carreras from Dearborn's Patch.com.
Last month, the pastor of a tiny church in Florida dressed up in a judge's robes and held a mock trial in which he pronounced a death sentence upon the Quran, an order he then carried out using kerosene and a barbecue lighter. News of his deed spread to Afghanistan, where thousands rioted during two days of protests that left 21 people dead, including 7 U.N. workers.
This week, Terry Jones, 59, went back to court -- a real court this time, in Michigan's 19th District. He'd come to Dearborn, a city with a large Muslim population, to demonstrate what he described as "the rise of Sharia law." The plan: Stage a rally outside the Islamic Center of America, the largest mosque in the United States.
On Thursday, Judge Mark Somers summoned Jones and a supporter named Wayne Sapp to the courthouse in response to a Wayne County prosecutor, whose office warned a protest in front of the mosque could "incite a riot." A jury determined the following day that the demonstration would likely "breach the peace," and Judge Somers ordered the men to stay away from the mosque for three years and pay a nominal $1 bond. Jones and Sapp initially refused to pay the bond and were briefly jailed.
Should Jones have been jailed? On the technicalities, it appears to be a “Yes.” On the overview of what the authorities in Michigan were trying to do (shut down the protest), it becomes murky with regard to the Constitution. If our country allows its citizens to freely express their opinions and someone does it and others are harmed – what is to be done?
Such is the dilemma. Is Jones’ rancor and hatred toward Muslims and their own bible the ultimate breach of the freedom of speech? When palpable harm to others on the scale of what happened in Afghanistan occurs, and is a potential threat to national security, a boundary should be in place, don’t you think?
One question of such a law is how would one delineate the difference between holding protests against political parties in front of their rallies, and those who protest against an entire religion in front of their church/temple/mosque? It’s OK for politics but not for religion? Isn’t the idea discriminatory?
What a thin tightrope to hobble across over freedom of speech, eh?
Jones may not be zooming off into the sunset on his Harley any time in the near future. He’s only one of many with similar viewpoints and a few loose bolts on their mental bikes who want to make statements with bravado under the guise of patriotism or religious zealotry. I ask again what do we do with them if their actions set off violence around the world while exercising “freedom of speech” at home?
What Frowning Mustache Pastor Loose Bolts has done and what was recently done to him is a perfect example of where another gap in the Constitution can be found. Are a few tweaks to the First Amendment the way to go? The way to bring the government into a very different century without harming the primary foundation of the Constitution?
The mind reels.
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