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I'm all for what she's trying to do. Yes, she appears to be � say it ain't so! � slightly partisan. But since when does being slightly partisan disqualify someone from having an opinion? Rightwing bloggers would have us believe that, unless you're a Republican (and an R who supports the war, no questions asked), you have no right to speak out about the war. � Dan Savage, subbing at Andrewsullivan.com

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Confusion on this point seems to be a form of paranoia which pops-up on both sides of the ideological spectrum, but it's particularly acute on the left. After 9/11 we heard from all over the place that free speech was under assault because the usual idiots were getting criticized for their usual idiocy. Again, I hate to be such a pain in the butt to Cynthia McKinney, but as I've noted before, it is the quickest route to her brain. When, after 9/11, McKinney behaved like, well, McKinney she was roundly criticized and rightly so. She immediately asserted that her "right to speak" had been questioned. No such thing occurred.

Don't Question the Left!
The great irony is that the people who resort to such "arguments" (they're really just insults) are the ones questioning free-speech rights, because they are suggesting the criticism was inappropriate and, in some vague and stupid way, unconstitutional. Right? That is the upshot of what they're saying. I mean, if you immediately assert that someone has the right to say something as a way to rebut criticism, aren't you implying that such criticism violated their rights � which is, by definition, unconstitutional.

The paranoia enters into it when you consider the nature of the accusation. If you immediately assume that criticism from the political Right is tantamount to questioning someone's constitutional right to speak in the first place, what you are really saying (Pace Dan Savage) is that if you scratch a conservative you'll find a Storm Trooper just under the surface. We knuckle draggers may say we're just offering criticism, but what we really mean is that anyone we disagree with has no right to say so. That so many on the Left seem to believe this, says a lot about the intellectual and psychological state of Lefties while saying nothing of interest about conservatives. I don't think it's always a matter of projection � assuming your enemy sees things the same you do � but I do think this knee-jerkery illuminates in a small way the bad faith of the Left. Not only does the "I have the right to speak" tantrum dodge the merits of specific criticisms, it starts from the assumption that as a matter of first principles left-wing protest should never be questioned.

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A third of Germans under 30 think America ordered the 9/11 attacks. The "theory" that the Pentagon attack was self-inflicted stagecraft is in wide circulation in France, and the subject of a best-selling book. Throughout Europe, it's easy to find commentators who take it at face value that Bush's failure to sign Kyoto led to Katrina. (It's worth noting: Clinton refused to sign it, too. And rightly so.)

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When Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was released two years ago, something strange and unprecedented happened. The secular news media could not get enough of the Gospels. Of course, this mass Bible study had a twist and a purpose: to show how Gibson got it wrong.

The criticisms began in 2003, well before the film's release, when a committee of scholars obtained a copy of the script. It issued a highly critical 18-page report, the views of which were summarized in a New Republic article by one of the committee members, Paula Fredriksen of Boston University. The article was called "Mad Mel" and centered on the issue of culpability for Jesus' death and purported anti-Semitism in Gibson's version of events.

The template was set. For two months before the release of the film, which broke box office records with $370 million in the USA alone, the question was raised in countless articles, culminating in Newsweek's cover story a week before the film's release: "Who Killed Jesus?"

After more people had actually seen the film, the controversy intensified as TV talk shows hosted pseudo-scholarly debates in between commercials for American Idol and laundry detergents.

All of a sudden, a movie's faithfulness to the biblical record was extremely important to a lot of people.

Now, two years later, The Da Vinci Code, another movie with biblical implications, is about to be released. Like Gibson's film, it tells a story about Jesus, but one that self-consciously has nothing in common with the New Testament. Indeed, its scholar characters proudly proclaim that the New Testament is completely wrong about Jesus.

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All that matters, Tom Hanks tells the only living descendant of Christ, is what you believe. Not truth, not reality, but whatever you believe. That's what matters. You make up reality as you go. The professor Hanks plays makes plain that he believes that Jesus is only a man�a man and that's all. A great moral teacher, perhaps, but only a man.

That, of course, is the one thing that the Jesus himself does not allow us to believe. If Jesus is only a man, he is no great moral teacher. He is on the contrary a fraud, a pretender, a horrible spendthrift with his own life and the lives of his apostles�all twelve of whom met a martyrdom like his, some of them crucified, all of them most brutally killed without the utterance of a single recantation. If He was not the Son of God, one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, he was either a mountebank or a lunatic, and deserves our contempt, not our praise. His every moral teaching would be vitiated by its radical emptiness and fraudulence.

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This sex stuff might have nudged some theatergoers awake, but it�s been removed from the plot. Now the supposed reason that Christ�s marriage to St. Mary Magdalene was concealed is because it would be proof of his �mortality.�

Characters had to say this several times before I figured out what they were trying to express. Apparently the idea is that, if Christ was married, then he didn�t rise from the dead. Which is nonsense. The Bible, in fact, doesn�t say that Jesus never married, though if he had it probably would have popped up in the communal memory somewhere. If it turns out that that detail somehow slipped the first evangelists� minds, it would make no difference to the Christian claims. Great teachers, male and female, have come and gone through the millennia, and their marital status was rarely relevant. What makes Jesus different is that he�s something more than an instructive memory; on the contrary, he keeps manifesting himself to people, even today, as an undeniable living presence. He keeps giving people first-hand proof that he is alive.