This is an important question: how free are you to insult someone? It depends a lot on the insult and where you are. First of all, you have to be sure that you’re not defaming; what you say has to either be true or a matter of legitimate debate. Second, you have to be sure that your speech is not going to lead to personal injury or harm. And third, it has to be in the correct forum; you can’t attend a college class and then stand up every day and declare that Bill Jones over there is a pervert.

It gets sketchier when you start talking about what a person is and what that means about their character, morality, and even their legal and civil rights. For example, if I made the claim (which I do not, so please don’t jump to conclusions) that Christians are foul, amoral hypocrites with a long history of oppression, murder, and deviance, and therefore should not be given any special privileges like tax exemptions for their churches, and perhaps should even not be allowed to practice their religion–well, I don’t think that would be tolerated for very long. Sure, I could blog on it, write books on the subject, talk to people about it in certain public venues, maybe even become a well-known advocate. But I don’t think that this freedom would extend to allowing my kids to expound on such views freely in their classrooms at my urging; I am pretty sure that such speech would be shut down, especially if it were planned and orchestrated at the national level and carried out by thousands of students in schools everywhere.

And yet, we have religious advocacy groups demanding that they be allowed to do just this type of thing–and that not being allowed to do it is a double-standard which curbs their rights. In fact, they claim that preventing them from doing this is a blow against tolerance itself. The subject is homosexuality, and the religious groups want to go into classrooms and talk about how vile, sinful, and wrong it is, and advocate that people who practice it are harmful and that laws giving these people special rights (equal rights for people conservatives don’t like are usually referred to as “special” rights) should be repealed. How they present this:

It’s sad, but many public schools have, in the name of “tolerance,” stifled free speech and true diversity by silencing students of faith, and those with conservative perspectives.

This isn’t true tolerance. True Tolerance means a free and respectful exchange of ideas.

The good news is, thanks to TrueTolerance.org, there’s something you can do about it.
Make your voice heard—and balance out the bias—by giving your school officials
helpful legal facts and social science data. Click the links below to see how easy it is.

Got that? Bashing gays is “tolerance,” the “free and respectful exchange of ideas”; it’s a matter of faith and perspective and free speech should allow gay bashing to be carried out in classrooms around the country.

Essentially, groups like this one are horrified by the idea that our young people are becoming tolerant of gays, and they want it stopped now. They want the power to spread their word that homosexuality is wrong, wrong, wrong, and don’t listen to those evil gay advocacy groups telling you that gays are just normal people who should have the same rights as everyone else. That’s the distilled message, of course, but it is accurate. And they are not satisfied to do this in their churches, on their web sites, and on the radio and television airwaves. No, they have to be allowed to go to classrooms and make their case to all young people, or else what they have is not free speech, and what we are is not tolerant.

They have a whole lot of materials on their site which do the usual creationist/pro-lifer/intelligent-designer/pro-prayer-in-schools whitewash job of cherry-picking facts out of context and making religious dogma look empirically fact-based. None of it holds up under close scrutiny, of course, but this is about “faith,” not facts, so it’s no surprise that it wasn’t thought out too carefully. What is presented is nothing more than a sheen to fulfill a visceral desire. Those who believe simply accept it from word “go,” and all too many people will climb on board because they are not equipped to see beyond the sincerity the disinformation is delivered with.

So maybe somebody should, in Flying-Spaghetti-Monster style, create an equal but opposite movement in the other direction–maybe calling it “True Faith” or something, and using similarly cherry-picked data to make the claim that Christians are dangerous and should not be tolerated–heaven knows that whoever did this would have a much richer field of information to fill in the blanks.

I doubt that the fundies behind “True Tolerance” would tolerate such “free speech” for very long at all.