Theocons of the world, unite! That's the title of Cathy Young's great little article in the June Reason. She does a fine job of showing just how traitorous some on the right can be about freedom:

In Christianity Today, managing editor Mark Galli urged a strong stand against terrorism but also sounded a startlingly sympathetic note toward the Islamic militants' anger at the hedonism, materialism, and secularism the West was exporting into their cultures. In October 2004, in the same magazine, Watergate felon turned evangelical minister Chuck Colson warned that the legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States would help radical Islamic terrorists by making our kind of freedom abhorrent to Muslims.

Meanwhile, in May of that year, former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan asserted in his syndicated column that on such issues as homosexuality, conservative Americans have more in common with devout Muslims than with liberal Democrats.

Chiding Bush for urging Muslims to embrace a version of liberty that includes the freedom of Larry Flynt to produce pornography and of Salman Rushdie to publish The Satanic Verses, Buchanan wrote, If conservatives reject the equality preached by Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, NARAL and the National Organization for Women, why seek to impose it on the Islamic world? Why not stand beside Islam, and against Hollywood and Hillary?

Well, not allowing people to publish books is illiberal and repressive. Equality, as preached by leftists, is largely a matter not of freedom but coercion. But of course, some parts of the equality preached on the left is liberty, and should be embraced because of it. Buchanan is, once again, showing conservatism's true color: hatred of the left for being the left, not anything positive.

Conservatives, like Muslim whackos, have a problem with liberty. If they disagree with something allowed by liberty, they somehow think that they are being dragooned into supporting it. Hey: if you don't like Salman Rushdie's novels, don't buy them, and bad-mouth them at every chance. Both your boycott and your protest are allowed by liberty. Suppressing the book, on the other hand, isn't.

To suggest that we not defend the right to publish blasphemy, or smut, or whatnot, is quite a suggestion. But the theocons have troubles not making that suggestion. As everybody knows, at the very soul of conservatism is the censor's fire.

Cathy Young rightly parses the conservative excuse, as an ostensible support for liberty and a simultaneous opposition to its abuse or freedom's excesses:

In effect, D'Souza, Colson, Buchanan and company agree with the familiar sentiment that the terrorists hate us for our freedoms. Their conclusion, however, is that those freedoms should be curbed — though they would say that they are talking not about freedom itself but its excesses. According to D'Souza, those excesses include the notion that men and women should have the same roles in society or that freedom of expression includes the right to publish material that is sexually explicit or blasphemous.

But of course freedom of expression does include publishing both Playboy and Live from Golgotha, as does freedom of contract, freedom of association, and the like. It follows from the idea of freedom that you may not attack those who peacefully go about doing their thing, even in ways you find offensive.

Offense is one thing. Taking offense another. And using your offense as an excuse to attack another a completely different thing.

Young is right to pillory the American conservative numbskulls and their silly misalliance with the Islamic bigots:

Yet there is no reason to believe that Islamic radicals or even most Muslim traditionalists oppose merely the excesses of, say, women's liberation rather than the basic notion of female equality. The Enemy at Home includes a sympathetic discussion of Islamist ideologue Sayyid Qutb's critique of America's moral decadence, but D'Souza neglects to mention that this critique was based on Qutb's stay in the United States in the notoriously licentious period of 1948 to 1950.

Radical Islamists' ire is directed not just at The Vagina Monologues but at beauty pageants, and they have often responded violently even to moderate steps toward the emancipation of women. Nor does D'Souza say much about the hostility not only toward secularism but toward other religions that is prevalent in the Muslim world today.

Young errs towards the end. She seems to confuse the true with the politically useful. But otherwise, this is a fine polemic.

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