Religious freedom necessitates protecting the right to worship freely. Religious freedom does not infer the right to have your faith held sacrosanct above the free speech of others.
This rather important distinction is one that Denmark has chosen to forget. In a statement on Friday, the Danish Justice Ministry announced a new censorship law. The proposed law comes in response to recent protests involving Koran burnings. These protests have sparked fury in the Islamic world and have heightened the terrorist threat facing Denmark.
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Responding to this concern, the Danish government should have reaffirmed its respect for different faiths, alongside its commitment to uphold the rights of protest that are central to any democracy. Instead, the government has yielded to mob threats and its own more idiotic impulses. The Justice Ministry explained, "The government therefore wants to criminalize inappropriate treatment of objects with significant religious significance for a religious community. The bill will, for example, make it a criminal offense to publicly burn the Bible or the Koran." Those who break this law will face up to two years in prison.
Still, the Danish government isn't quite ready to admit the basic reality of its crackdown on freedom.
Left-wing Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard claimed, "Freedom of expression is a cornerstone of Danish democracy, and the freedom to express oneself is a central value in Danish society. The government's proposal is a targeted intervention which does not change the fact that freedom of expression must have a very broad framework in Denmark." Hummelgaard fails to explain how protecting a "cornerstone of Danish democracy" is compatible with destroying a cornerstone of free speech.
Public protests on matters of public import are viewed by most democracies as the most exigent of free speech concerns, making it deserving of the highest, not the least, legal protection. Unfortunately, this Danish government does not appear terribly well-versed in such philosophy.
Take Deputy Prime Minister Jakob Ellemann-Jensen's inane justification for the new law. According to him, "Burning, desecrating or otherwise destroying the holy scriptures of others serves no other purpose than to provoke for the sake of provocation ... Books should not be burned — they should be read."
Note the two brilliantly idiotic inferences here. First, Ellemann-Jensen takes it upon himself to declare that the "purpose" for any and all acts of burning religious scripts must be to "provoke for the sake of provocation." Having established that he can read all protesters' minds, the Deputy Prime Minister then presents his strategy as a repudiation of Nazi-style book burning. It's an argument without intellectual merit.
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After all, does Ellemann-Jensen also wish to ban Jews from burning Hitler's antisemitic autobiography, Mein Kampf? Does he wish to ban Danes from burning the EU Constitution? I think not. And therein lies the problem. This new law would enshrine two subjective standards for controversial speech. It takes the exact opposite approach to U.S. speech law guardrails which require that any governmental restrictions on speech be content-neutral. Instead, Denmark will vary legal protections for public speech based on the threats that some are willing to manifest against speech they dislike. This is a patently puerile bending of the knee to the speech school of fascism: The more you threaten, the more we'll prioritize your rights. You'd think the ancestors of the Vikings might have shown a little more courage here.
Fortunately, the founders have charted a different course for America. As Chief Justice John Roberts opined in 2011, "As a nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate."