Good Thing Anne Didn't Badmouth Attaturk

I haven't blogged about the most recent Anne Coulter flap, mostly because it's been done to death elsewhere (if you really want my thoughts on it, they're sort of in this thread at the WV Bloggers Board). But something else popped up in the news that is an interesting parallel case study.

Coulter, in a cycle that's well known to the right-wing bomb throwers, has now turned herself (again) into the high princess of the First Amendment. It goes something like this: Coulter (or Malkin or Savage or . . .) says something dumb/inflammatory, which prompts some folks to condemn her/call for a boycott/etc., which prompts Coulter to turn around and swipe at those folks as trying to suppress her rights under the First Amendment.

That, of course, is bollocks. The First Amendment applies to government action. Period, full stop, do not pass "Go." It gives Coulter the right to say whatever she wants, but it gives others the right to chastise her for it and doesn't require anybody to give her a forum to say whatever she says. You've got a perfect right to call me a jackass, but I don't have to let you say it on my blog (I probably will, tho'). The marketplace of ideas can be a brutal place, but it's better than the alternative.

Like what the Turks have done to YouTube. Around the same time Coulter was calling John Edwards a faggot, some folks put some video on YouTube that was seriously disrespectful of Mustafa Kemal Attaturk. Ironically, some of it made the claim that Attaturk was gay. Not content to let the attackers be rebutted by loyal Turks (as apparently happened) or simply ignore them, a Turkish court ordered Internet providers in Turkey to block access to YouTube because it fostered insults to "Turkishness."*

What's the lesson in all this? I don't know. I think it's that the robust First Amendment allows blowhards like Coulter to thrive in the marketplace of ideas, but she's a small price to pay for not having to worry about insulting the national heritage.

* One wonders if Monty Python's "Eric the Half a Bee" sketch is banned in Turkey, since is comically proposes that "Kemel Attaturk had an entire menagerie called Abdul!"