Loyalty to the Qur’an can conflict painfully with free-speech values inside one person

Evidence

As a local school teacher told me, “My son said he would jump in to stop Jones from burning the Qur’an. I could not tell him this was wrong. I was proud of him. I wanted to support the way he felt, but I wanted to defend free speech. It was a strange moment for me.” — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 677

Categorization

• DEFINE: A lived instance of the frightened subject: the teacher’s internal ambivalence shows the moral cost of the urge to defend.