Je suis fondamentaliste

We don’t seem to be very popular these days, so I am going to make this confession using the formula popularised by Alcoholics Anonymous.

My name is Andrew, and I am a Fundamentalist. Unlike most people, I really do believe in free speech.

It’s been very touching to see the upswell of world opinion claiming to agree. Of course, it was hard to hold your lunch down when you saw that the Saudi government was joining in, and it was a bit hard to take Binyamin Netanyahu as well – God himself, like Charlie, clearly has a bitterly satirical sense of humour to allow those two to campaign for freedom. But I suspect the credentials of not only the usual suspects like them, but of many of the marching crowds.

Try a few questions:

If you walked into a newsagent with your young children, and were faced with a magazine cover depicting, in graphic detail, a gay couple enjoying anal sex – would you still be such a devotee of freedom?

Would you march for the right of building workers to whistle at a pretty girl, and shout “Oi, darlin’, get yer tits out for the boys!”?

What about racist language? Or homophobic language? After all, Harriet Harman declared, after Jeremy Clarkson had mumbled the shabby old rhyme “Eeny-meeny-miny-mo” under his breath in a piece of untransmitted footage,  “Anybody who uses the N-word in public or private in whatever context has no place in the BBC.”

It’s fairly easy for a Fundamentalist defender of free expression – and I confess, incidentally, that  I find it hard to see how a writer could be anything else. Words, after all, are all we have. I believe that none of those examples should trouble the law, or the Human Resources department of the BBC, for that matter. But if you’re less sure about them, then you’re a defender only of limited free expression.

It’s a point of view. But it does mean that you should probably shut up about the inalienable right to publish cartoons that cause great offence to lots of people.