The Quran also burns at Fahrenheit 451

From Nick Spicer in AlJazeera Blogs:

An outsider seeking to understand the angry debate over a Florida pastor who plans to hold an “International Burn a Quran Day” on September 11 would do well to consider two texts familiar to most Americans.

First is Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (the title refers to the temperature at which paper burns).

This reading-list staple in American high schools tells the story of Guy Montag, a “fireman” of the future whose job is not to extinguish fires, but, in an over-entertained, savage dystopia, to burn books.

And thereby to extinguish independent thought.

The book echoes the anti-intellectual strain in American culture, something Bradbury worried about in the America of 1953. Fears of Soviet “enemies within” were tearing the nation apart; the country’s politics and cultural life were polluted by a fantasy-based ideological witch hunt organized by Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin.

The other document is the US constitution, a text Americans are taught to venerate as a model charter for ensuring life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Its first amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

It is not, obviously, freedom of religion that explains the planned action of the Florida pastor.

It is rather the constitutional protection of free speech that is important.

The pastor could easily evoke it before the courts to say that he was merely expressing himself – as the constitution guarantees – with his anti-Islamic bonfire.

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