CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS The price we pay for our practice of free speech

end of the spectrum, Newt Gingrich told CNN last week that the U.S. should use this episode to “teach the Muslim world about freedom” — free speech in particular.

He’s right. Even if it were possible to put the toothpaste back in the tube as Joyner demands, one has to ask: What next? If extremists on the far side of the world learn the lesson that we will abandon a core principle because they throw tantrums or even commit murder, what does that tell them about us? What might we next be bullied into doing?

There is nothing congenitally “Muslim” about the way some in the Middle East and Africa are responding to this film’s insult of their religion. If there were, Muslims would be rioting in Cleveland and Detroit as well.

They are not, because Muslim-Americans, like other Americans, know there is a reason you embrace those dangerous words. Namely, that though they give license to outrage, offense and obscenity, they also give license to that which enlightens, ennobles and uplifts. They liberate the worst in us, but also the best, a tradeoff Americans have always found worthwhile. We are now tasked with explaining that to parts of the world where the outrageous can’t be said aloud and conformity is required by law.

That will not be easy, especially when Americans have been killed, and standing up for this principle requires you to stand behind a greasy little morsel like “Innocence of Muslims.” Worse, we must make that case to those who have no framework to even understand what free expression is. But we have no choice. That is what this moment demands.

It is the price we pay for believing in dangerous words.

Kyle Wingfield

My Opinion

Politicians are not always good at the “telephone” game. Witness Mitt Romney.

In “telephone,” as you may remember from your youth, one person whispers a phrase to another person, who whispers it to another, and so on, until the last person. When the message reaches the final set of ears, it’s usually been misspoken so many times as to be unrecognizable to the original speaker.

That game came to mind this week when a video surfaced, depicting Romney speaking at a May 17 fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. Romney is recorded saying, in part:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47