Why Koran burning deserves First Amendment protection

Sen. Lindsey Graham and others want to ban this legal form of protest. They're wrong

There oughta be a law. When people get angry over some perceived slight or injustice, that is usually their first, unfortunate reaction – that government should impose some fairness where life does not. That's true even in a society that cherishes freedom to the point of enshrining limitations of government specific to the natural rights of free thought, free speech, self-defense, and religious practice, a context that provided a look this week into just how fragile those restraints can be.

There is little to cheer or champion in the actions of Florida preacher Terry Jones, who had earlier threatened to light a Koran on fire, and then did so two weeks ago after a "trial" of the Muslim scriptures. Several days after the burning, riots erupted in Afghanistan, and seven United Nations aid workers were brutally murdered. Instead of blaming the actual killers, or the imams and government officials that incited the riots, media attention instead focused on the book burner – and at least one politician leaped to take advantage of the controversy.

Whether one has an antipathy towards that particular religion or faith in general, the act of burning books holds a historical resonance – especially from the 20th century – that causes a natural revulsion in a free society. Compounding the nonsense is the anachronism of book burning in an era of mass publication and online accessibility. Burning one copy of any published book means nothing more than the momentary release of potential energy from the pages themselves. We have not lived in an illuminated-manuscript environment since not long after Johannes Gutenberg first launched his printing press, and burning a book in a modern staging of the climax of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose does nothing but slightly increase sales at local bookstores. All that gets destroyed in book burnings are minute amounts of capital, not ideas, whether good, bad, benign, or dangerous.

Still, people burn books as a particularly impotent form of protest, which they have a right to do, assuming the protesters own the books they burn and break no other laws in doing so. People have just as much right to criticize the burning of books through either rhetorical speech or through other forms of demonstration. If laws do get broken – for instance, if a protest turns violent and property other than that of the protesters gets damaged or people get assaulted – then the laws of this country hold the protesters responsible for their own actions, and not the people against whom they protested. Those demanding action or sanction against the protester after a counterprotest turns deadly effectively give the lunatics veto power over the free, and make speech a privilege granted by government rather than a recognition of a natural human right.

It's bad enough that many free people fail to understand this when confronted with speech they dislike. When our elected officials fan those flames, it's especially irresponsible. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham asserted in a CBS interview over the weekend that he would prefer to "hold people accountable" for the Koran burning, because while "free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war," implying we can't afford both at the same time. The next day, he went into more detail with The National Review, citing Gen. David Petraeus's condemnation of the Koran burning. "Let me tell you, the First Amendment means nothing without people like Gen. Petraeus. The First Amendment does allow you to burn a Koran, but I don't think it's a responsible use of our First Amendment right."