After 1,000 enraged Sikhs stormed the Birmingham Repertory Theatre on December 18, 2004 — throwing eggs, smashing windows, injuring three police officers, and halting the production of the play “Behzti” — Lionel Shriver wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
I am under no obligation to respect your beliefs. Respect … is not an entitlement. I may regard creationists as plain wrong, which would make holding their beliefs in high regard nonsensical. In kind, if I proclaim on a street corner that a certain Japanese beetle in my back garden is the new Messiah, you are also within your rights to ridicule me as a fruitcake.
The RIGHT to HAVE a belief is what must be respected in a civil society, not the silly belief itself. Thus the rioters — whose RIGHT to HAVE their silly beliefs was NOT being disrespected — had no right to violently disrespect their neighbors’ RIGHT to HAVE a somewhat different silly belief. By failing to secure these rights impartially, the civil authorities were mortally derelict in their duty. If now it is the very RIGHT OF WAY that is being disrespected, it is because your police have been rendered as useless as teats on a rock.
In 1965 the Edmund Pettus Bridge at Selma, Alabama was a “no-go” area, too, but civil rights marchers led by Martin Luther King Jr. defied it three times, and got beaten in the process. Brits may be at this point already, of nothing left to do but to overcome.
