Insults & the Law

I'm in favor of cultural and religious sensitivity, but doesn't such sensitivity go both ways? When British teacher Gillian Gibbons allowed her class to choose the name Mohammed for a teddy bear in Sudan, she did not know that doing so would offend anyone. It is, after all, the most popular boy's name in that country, and the name of the most popular boy in her class. So to charge her with a crime punishable by 40 lashes or jail for a year, seems so utterly unreasonable on its face. It is one thing to defend one's holy leader (and by the way, if God is God, then God doesn't need me to defend), but quite another to use the law to punish a person who never intended harm, who is in one's country to help, and who may not know all the the in's-and-out's of the culture. Indeed, a reasonable person might well have thought that if she did not allow the teddy to be named Mohammed that someone ELSE would have gotten insulted!

So, dare I suggest taking a line from a different holy book--when someone strikes you on one cheek, turn the other to him also. Insults only do the amount of harm that we permit them to do. If we choose not to be harmed by them, then they have no power. When we allow insults to have the power of Law, the Law kills.

Update: She was found guilty and sentenced to 14 days in jail. Thoughtful judges, who considered the full weight of the matter, decided that she was guilty. What. A. Crock.

Update 2: It's been revealed that Gibbons was ratted out by the school's own secretary. Now 600 demonstrators are rioting and calling for her execution. There is something deeply, deeply disturbing about this thirst for blood.

Update 3: She is finally free now, and the latest news is that the secretary had been fired a couple weeks earlier, and she ratted them out in order to get the school shut down. In that respect, it worked, the school is shut down and no word on when it would re-open.