To disagree, respectfully, freedom is the core issue.

Perhaps unfortunately, this incredibly malleable word, freedom, co-exists in a constant state of tension with the institutions and structures that allow it to emerge. Put otherwise, the exercise of personal freedom, no matter how defined, must bear an antagonistic relationship to structures that, paradoxically, enable it, structures such as the State.

That unbridled freedom cannot exist allows us to live together as and in communities. Freud bases his entire theory of human development on this premise. You point to the law’s inability to judge morality, only criminality. In which case, I’d simply ask how we develop notions of criminality if not through recourse to moral frameworks, religious and otherwise.

Law continually engages different traditions of morality. It has to. We might not take Kant’s Categorical Imperative as the basis for contemporary legal theory (a stance I’d debate any day), but we do invoke morality as and when we assign judgment.

Indeed, the current debates over reparation, holocaust denial, abortion, and gay marriage are precisely exercises in legislating morality. Now, whether the law can redress moral forms of injury through material forms of compensation is a whole other issue.

What “A” finds offensive may be harmless to “B” but we cannot endorse the preaching of hatred or inciting others to commit murder, in the name of free speech. I accept there are limitations to the law. We will always come a cropper if we try to mix law with morality.

I have looked at the issue of whether “free speech” would allow a paedophile to speak/write/act about his (the are nearly always men) evil and dirty ways. I would say no..However the law does not judge morality; only criminality.

Consider this: Stephen King, Alfred Hitchcock , Robert Ludlum, John Grisham amongst others are all writers whose speciality is crime….sometimes gruesome crime. Yet we have no problem with this. We have no problem with films that portray gratuitous violence at the most to extreme levels. Our double standards are amazing.

When you hear all the raging debates you realise that the core issue is never really about freedom.

Also, it took me a while to understand how and when I had become your groupie :)