Once again, zealots have decided that a form of speech that offends them needs to be punished, and even here in America free speech is anything but free, let alone adequately protected, as the woman who created Draw Mohammad Day has unfortunately learned the hard way:

You may have noticed that Molly Norris’ comic is not in the paper this week. That’s because there is no more Molly.

The gifted artist is alive and well, thankfully. But on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, “going ghost”: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program—except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It’s all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoon.

In other words, because this woman dared to draw a cartoon that some mouth-breathing idiots didn’t like, she’s being forced to give up her entire life, her very identity, in the hope that they will be unable to find her and carry out their terroristic death threats.

This cartoon, as a matter of fact:

Naturally, it was completely legal to draw and publish this cartoon, much like it was perfectly legal for an Australian man to burn pages from a Bible and Koran in front of his webcam, much like it would have been perfectly legal for Terry Jones to burn his own Korans. Yet somehow, when people choose to criticize religion in public, Islam in particular, that legal right gets overlooked in the rush to harass them, suppress their speech, take their jobs, and if that fails, there’s always issuing death threats!

In spite of this obvious lunacy, you also always get concern trolls coming out of the woodwork, who always make it clear that, yes, you have a *right* to do these things, technically, legally.. they suppose… but if you dare to exercise it, why, you’d better expect some nasty, even violent consequences, you silly libertines.

Concern trolls like Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing:

I’m of the opinion that pissing on a symbol for what someone else holds as sacred generally proves you to be a douche, or a provocateur who’s in it for attention.

Should it be legal, as free speech? Hell yes.

Does free speech mean you won’t encounter some potentially violent consequences, from some wacked-out fringe members of the community you mock?

Sorry. It doesn’t. Your relative privilege as a white American doesn’t make you immune to that.

Silly me, I thought that the First Amendment and laws against violence were there to protect us from that.

The concern trolls also like to trot out the argument that we need to forfeit our rights at home because someone might retaliate against the soldiers we have stationed overseas in the perpetual War on Terror (which is bound to be over soon), but I’ll let the ACLU answer that one:

When asked about the national security aspect of burning the Quran–meaning the inflammatory act could put troops in harm’s way–Hensler told CBS News: “we’re not insensitive to endangering troops abroad… but you can’t censor speech based on hypothetical outcome. The Reverend clearly has the free speech right to burn a Quran, as disgusting and vile an act as it is. It’s everybody else’s right to exercise their free speech against him. You can’t pick and choose who has constitutional rights.”

Nice in theory, but then again, what’s a little thing like the rule of law when a religious person’s feelings get hurt? I guess we’d better just give up on all these rights we can’t actually exercise. It’s a lot safer that way.