[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 14 (Wednesday, February 8, 2006)]
[House]
[Page H200]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to 
speak in the gentleman from California's place.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from Massachusetts?
  There was no objection.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, many of us want to join in 
wishing Mrs. Gingrey a happy birthday. And I guess we would say it is 8 
o'clock, and she knows where her son is tonight at least.
  Mr. Speaker, I am troubled by the assault on freedom of expression 
that we are seeing in the world today. I want to be very clear. The 
newspaper in Denmark, the name of which I will not even try to 
pronounce, had every right to print the cartoon. That does not mean the 
cartoon was not offensive or disrespectful. Free speech, freedom of 
expression means nothing if it does not mean the right to be mean and 
disrespectful and obnoxious. It is easy to be for free speech when it 
is polite and civil and when you agree with it.
  One of the dangers that comes to free speech are those who say, well, 
yes, we believe in freedom of speech, but it should be respectful. We 
believe in freedom of speech, but it has to be reined in. No it does 
not. Freedom of expression means that as long as you are speaking or 
writing, as long as you are not acting, you are free to exercise what 
you think you need to say, what you think you need to write. Now, 
people who are offended by that writing have every right in return to 
be very critical and, indeed, even to boycott the organ that printed 
it.
  But we see something today that is terribly frightening that goes far 
beyond it. First of all, we see this extraordinarily disproportionate 
violent reaction. I am struck that in parts of the Middle East and 
elsewhere, people who were apparently not moved to action by death and 
destruction and murder and famine, are moved to violence because 
somebody printed a cartoon. The values of people who put a cartoon 
ahead of serious damage to individuals as a cause of outrage are 
seriously deficient.
  But it is also wrong when people say they are going to put pressure 
on the entire nation of Denmark because it will not censor a newspaper. 
Again, people have a right to boycott the newspaper. People who 
exercise their free speech have to expect there might be a response. 
But what we are being told is that people are going to punish the 
entire nation of Denmark because that government will not censor a 
newspaper. That is a terrible threat to free speech. It would be a 
grave error for the country of Denmark to give in. When I read that 
people are going to boycott Danish goods, I am myself moved to try to 
go out and buy some Danish food. I wish some of it was not quite so 
fattening, from what I look at.
  But we must repudiate the notion that it is legitimate to punish the 
government and the country of that government because it will not 
censor a newspaper. That is a terrible threat to free speech. It is a 
threat to free speech again when people defend the newspaper in such a 
halfhearted way or when people say, well, they should not have printed 
that, and we understand why people are doing this. And freedom of 
speech must be tempered by respect for the views of others. No, it must 
not.
  And I speak as someone who has espoused that principle in a variety 
of categories. I am Jewish and I believe that the Nazis had a legal 
right to march in Skokie, as despicable as I thought that was, as much 
as I thought people ought to have expressed their disagreement. I am a 
patriotic American, but I would not vote to put you in prison if you 
burned the American flag. And I must say, let us have some consistency 
here. People who are for jailing those who disrespect the American flag 
seem to me ought to be thinking about what kind of reaction they are 
seeing now because people dishonored the prophet Mohammed.
  There are people who put their religion ahead of their country. That 
is not necessarily an irrational or an immoral thing to do. Let us be 
very careful. And by the way, I think that newspapers in the Arab world 
have a legal right to print vicious anti-Semitic cartoons that deny the 
Holocaust, that talk about ``The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.''
  Again, let us have some consistency here. The consistency ought to be 
this: people have a right to write or say whatever they wish. People 
who are offended by that writing or that speech are entitled to 
retaliate, nonviolently, but by boycotts, by criticism from the person 
who expresses it. But when we see this kind of violence, when it is 
suggested that a cartoon justifies violence, when people are 
halfhearted in condemning the violence, when we have people say that it 
is legitimate to punish a government, not for publishing a cartoon, but 
for failing to censor the publication of that cartoon, then free speech 
is in danger.
  So I think it is very important for us to say that people may have 
whatever view they have about the cartoon, but we must speak up against 
what is a growing systematic campaign of intimidation that will result 
in a diminution of those important freedoms.

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