Note: This post was meant to go up early this morning, but it got lost in the shuffle.
On Sunday, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham reacted to the Quran burning by a Florida pastor and associated mob violence in Afghanistan by arguing that "Free speech is a great idea but we’re in a war."
The right responded to such fury to Graham's remarks that he rushed to National Review to do damage control.
General Petraeus sent a statement out to all news organizations yesterday, urging our government to [condemn] Koran burning. Free speech probably allows that, but I don’t like that. I don’t like burning the flag under the idea of free speech. That bothers me; I have been one of the chief sponsors of legislation against burning the flag. I don’t like the idea that these people picket funerals of slain servicemen. If I had my way, that wouldn’t be free speech. So there are a lot of things under the guise of free speech that I think are harmful and hateful.
In Washington, it's customary to give people credit for being consistent, even if they're consistently wrong. I'm not going to do that. But Graham is certainly being consistent here; he was among the Republican and Democratic senators who came within a hair's breadth of approving a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning in 2006. See, there was an election coming up, and Republicans thought they might keep their majority if they could persuade Americans that Democrats were just a bunch of America-hating hippies who smoke joints rolled in American flags before bedding down for the night.
That didn't work. But National Review endorsed the amendment in an editorial, and while there was some mild dissent among some of its writers, there was none of the outrage that greeted Graham's statement. That's because for many conservatives, the outrage over Graham's response to the Quran burning had little to do with free-speech rights, and more to do with appeasing those violent, primitive Muslims.
Consider National Review writer Mark Steyn's reaction:
In the absence of cultural confidence overseas, we are expending blood and treasure building an Afghanistan fit only for pederasts, tribal heroin cartels, and the blood-soaked savages of Mazar e-Sharif. In the absence of cultural confidence at home, we are sending the message that the bedrock principles of free, pluralist societies will bend and crumble in a vain race to keep up with the ever touchier sensitivities of the perpetually aggrieved.
Someone tell the U.S. military they're wasting their money on empiricism and analysis; they just need a little "cultural confidence," and the Taliban will be vanquished. Andy McCarthy co-signed Steyn's analysis crying, "no more dhimmitude." That isn't about freedom of speech. That is about Graham's remark stoking panicked fears of American cultural submission to Muslims.
That's what this incident, and the so-called Ground Zero mosque have in common. Conservatives were perfectly happy to send the signal that the "bedrock principles of free, pluralist societies would bend and crumble" in the face of terrorism when Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf proposed turning a Burlington Coat Factory in lower Manhattan into an Islamic community center. Then, conservatives offered rhetorical pablum about the First Amendment while in practice, trying to use zoning laws to prevent the building from being built. The 2010 Republican nominee for governor, Carl Paladino, defeated establishment candidate Rick Lazio in the primary largely on the strength of his single-minded campaign against the so-called "Ground Zero mosque."
There is a discernable principle here. Between Quran burning, the so-called Ground Zero mosque and even today's crowing over the administration's abandonment of federal trials for the 9/11 suspects, conservatives believe we can't abandon our own bedrock values in the fight against terrorism, unless those principles might also apply to Muslims. Graham's problem wasn't his disregard for the First Amendment; it was not being as selective about it as he should have been.
