Giving Thanks for Freedom

We have it so good in America, sometimes we fail to appreciate things that we have (for now) like free speech.

A pastor in Germany has been sentenced to a year in jail for the "crime" of comparing abortion to the Nazi holocaust.

Pastor Johannes Lerle compared the annual murder of 150,000 babies through abortion in Germany to the murder of thousands of innocent Jews in Auschwitz. The court, which consisted of no jury and a single judge, ruled that this statement made Lerle a holocaust denier.

I wonder if the disingenuous Judge Erda Erdenhofner realizes it's illogical to brand Pastor Lerle of being a holocaust denier when his statement was intended to add weight to his opposition to abortion by pointing out how horrible the holocaust was. By her logic, she's claiming Pastor Lerle said that abortion didn't exist because the Jewish holocaust didn't exist. But then, logic is optional for totalitarians.

This "career criminal" pastor has had other brushes with "the law" before

He was formerly imprisoned for calling abortionists and their aides “child murderers.”

And Pastor Lerle isn't the only one guilty of the crime of speaking politically incorrect truths:

German pro-life advocate Günter Annen, for example, was reported by the Journal as having called for an end to “unjust abortions” in 2005. She received a 50-day jail sentence on the grounds that her claim that abortion is “unjust” is legally inaccurate. The courts decided that her words wrongly implied that abortion is illegal in Germany.

Authorities must not know or care that there is, unfortunately, often a difference between what is moral and what is legal.

Thank God that "hate crime" proponents and other idea-enforcers haven't yet stripped us of the freedom to speak the truth in the United States.