Yesterday, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights forthrightly condemned the killings at Charlie Hebdo: "Killing in response to insult, no matter how gross, must be unequivocally condemned. That is why what happened in Paris cannot be tolerated."
Then in the third sentence he took it all back: "But neither should we tolerate the kind of intolerance that provoked this violent reaction."
Much as we Americans pat ourselves on the back about the First Amendment and our national commitment to free speech, we're not always comfortable about it.
After all, most of the members of the Revolutionary generation were still alive in 1798 when the Federalist Congress passed, and President John Adams signed, the Sedition Act, which provided punishment for in part: "To write, print, utter or publish, or cause it to be done, or assist in it, any false, scandalous, and malicious writing against the government of the United States, or either House of Congress, or the President, with intent to defame, or bring either into contempt or disrepute. …"
When President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland in 1861, Frank Key Howard, Francis Scott Key's grandson, publicly criticized the action and was promptly imprisoned at Fort McHenry without trial.
Every year the American Library Association finds it necessary to observe Banned Books Week, during which it records efforts at censorship, many of them ludicrous, around the nation.