Laws against blasphemy must be stricken from the books and the very concept of blasphemy as a criminal offense must be expunged from the minds of men

'WEEKLY GUN BATTLES IN COPENHAGEN"

"AMERICA IS IN FOR IT"

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FREE SPEECH: ITS BENEFITS AND LIMITATIONS

By Lars Hedegaard

President of the Danish Free Press Society

6.1.2007

...

Dear organizers, ladies and gentlemen,

Thank you for inviting a representative of Denmark's Free Press Society to give a keynote speech to this distinguished audience.

Perhaps I am not mistaken if I assume that the fact the a Dane has been chosen may have something to do with my country's recent experience regarding the benefits and limitations of free speech.

Last week, on September the 30th, exactly a year had passed since the by now famous newspaper Jyllands-Posten published its equally famous – or is it infamous? – Muhammed cartoons.

To mark this anniversary – which was top news all over the Danish press – an editor from the weekly Weekendavisen asked a few people to write up a so-called democracy canon. To those of you not immediately familiar with the concept, a canon in this sense can be defined as a body of works that may be accepted as axiomatic and universally binding in a field of study. So to create a democracy canon means to select those works that may be deemed indispensable if one wants to understand how democracy and free speech came about in Denmark. A democracy canon is so to speak a list of sacred books – not in a religious sense, of course.

One of the organizations asked to suggest a democracy canon was the Free Press Society. So we had an occasion to review 250 years or so of Danish history in order to pick 10-15 indispensable works by people who had paved the way for the democratic system we enjoy today.

It turned out to be a learning experience...

READ IT ALL!

http://www.sappho.dk/Den%20loebende/freespeech.html