REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA – The US Deputy Assistant Secretary from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Dan Baer, said that the government did not restrict offensive speech pertaining any religion. “There are some countries that do.  And one of the things that we’ve seen, not only do we think that that’s inconsistent with freedom of expression, but we’ve also seen that it’s not effective,” he said on Thursday in the State Department’s online interactive video platform to discuss freedom of expression with international media, including Republika.

“I am sure that there will be, and have been, requests for that (curbing the expression considered Islamophobia –Ed).  But I think one of the things that we’ve seen – and it should be clear to everybody that in the United States we do not restrict anti-Semitic speech; we don’t restrict offensive speech pertaining to any religion,” he added. 

Baer then responded to the question whether religion should be exempt from the concepts of freedom of expression. “No, religion shouldn’t be exempt from the concepts of freedom of expression.  Again, that would be a – that would actually be a threat, strangely, to freedom of religion,” he said. 

He said people of faith probably believed that their faith was the right faith so they wanted to have the right to be able to talk about that, to be able to say so.  “And if we removed religion from the purvey of freedom of expression, we would be subjecting ourselves, exposing ourselves to the risk that our faith might be the one that people decided wasn’t conforming to the status quo.  And so it would be contrary to freedom of religion to exempt it from freedom of expression protections.  We need to protect both freedom of expression and freedom of religion because they are mutually reinforcing,” he argued.  

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