"Freedom Is Like A Muscle: Without Exercise, It Atrophies"

Roger Kimball offers a primer on “How Freedom Is Lost”:

Freedom is like a muscle: without exercise, it atrophies. Consider the case of Geert Wilders, which I mentioned in this virtual space yesterday. Last week, Gordon Brown’s government could have exercised the freedom muscle and allowed Wilders entry into Britain to to address the House of Lords and to screen “Fitna,” his 15-minute film about the Koranic roots of Islamic terrorism. Instead, Mr. Brown’s government took the lazy way out. Much easier to turn back a duly elected Member of Parliament at Heathrow than risk the unhappiness of an intolerant minority. Easier, that is, today, when it might seem that the only person’s freedom directly at stake is a controversial foreign politician.

That’s the thing about the freedom muscle, though. You neglect to exercise it today for the sake of something that seems marginal, and tomorrow you find yourself incapable of deploying it to defend something that seems much closer to home.

We’ll always have Twitter, though…