Comedian Bill Maher on Friday night bashed liberals who have protested his controversial comments on Islam, but now show solidarity with French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Maher referenced the students at University of California-Berkley who tried to keep him from giving the commencement speech last year, and criticized the efforts to suppress his viewpoint.
“Liberals hate bullying, alright. But they’re not opposed to using it. When they casually throw out words like ‘bigot’ and ‘racist,’ it does cow people into avoiding this debate,” he said on his HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher.” “And if you’re doing that, you don’t get to wear the ‘Je suis Charlie’ button. The button you should wear says ‘Je suis part of the problem.'”
“Opinions shouldn’t be illegal,” he continued. “Everyone can always come up with a reason why the thing that bugs you should get a waiver, but free speech only works if there are no waivers — no waivers, including for religion.”
Watch the video via “Real Time with Bill Maher.”
Bill seems to always find his ‘me’ angle in every news story.
Yes, but is what he said untrue?
" … free speech only works if there are no waivers — no waivers, including for religion."
Agreed, and also including Bill Maher. No liberal is saying that Maher’s opinions should be illegal, but free speech means that anyone is free to criticize Maher and protest against his opinions. He doesn’t seem to get that.
Provocative as usual. Don’t always agree with Maher, but I do agree it’s wrong and hypocritical for the French government, or any government, to arrest someone for saying something repulsive or ugly. I disagree that focusing on single events or people and then drawing broader conclusions about them really says much of anything other than what the person doing it wants to believe. But there’s plenty of room for everyone to continue to self-evaluate our own opinions and how we (through our own prejudices) selectively apply them.
I don’t know why this is so hard for so many people to understand. People saying “Je suis Charlie” are expressing support for a magazine in reaction to 12 journalists and cartoonists from it being murdered for expressing their views, which in case Bill Maher hasn’t noticed, is what actually happened last week.
Since then people from across the political spectrum, from David Brooks to Maher to have issued these ridiculous pronouncements asserting that anyone who objects to people being killed for expressing an opinion or using satire is being a terrible hypocrite if also thinking that universities or student bodies have the right to decide who they want or don’t want speaking at their events.
The idea that if you protest people being gunned down for religious “blasphemy” you must also protest any business or university making decisions about who to hire or fire or hire for a speaking engagement is completely bonkers, yet here it is being asserted over and over. It’s amazing that this even has to be said, but let’s say it anyway: the two are not the same thing.