I have often made the quite legitimate accusation against certain foreign bloggers that there are dynamics of our American society that they don't understand, and that they write in ignorance of some of those dynamics. Now I have to plead guilty to doing that myself.

You see, in the recent uproar over the cartoons published in a Danish newspaper, I applied AMERICAN constitutional standards to my opinion, not those of Europe, or specifically the Danes.

While my assessment of the situation would have been correct had the cartoons been published first inthis country, in light of their country of origin, it was, quite frankly, not correct. As Larry Kuperman pointed out in another thread, cartoons that offend other religious groups ARE banned in Denmark, and the standard HAS been applied to cartoons against Jews and Christians.

This brings us to the point often expressed by another blogger: if you don't like a law, change it. As long as it is on the books, though, enforce it, and enforce it equally.

I believe the Danish laws against publishing materials offensive to different religions is wrong. But this is a Danish issue, and it is up to Danes to decide for themselves what standard they prefer. As long as it is a right of the government to restrict the publication of materials such as this that they deem offensive, then the law must be obeyed.