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The only Borders store I have shopped at here in Rhode Island is the one in the Providence Place Mall, but I do visit the Waldenbooks store in the Wakefield Mall on a fairly regular basis and (although I spend far more money at Amazon.com) I have purchased a considerable number of books from them over the past several years, both books for myself and books to give as gifts. (In fact, I had been planning on purchasing a gift card there this weekend. That purchase will now become an Amazon gift card.) Why am I doing this? Because Borders/Waldenbooks supports the crushing of free speech.
I have never read a copy of Free Inquiry magazine -- I'm not sure that I've ever even heard of it before now -- but I am outraged at this cowardly and craven surrender to mobs of howling morons in Europe and the Middle East. The magazine (which is published by a secular humanist group) has an article about free speech and the attempts to suppress it. The magazine reproduces four of the Danish cartoons that sparked embassy burnings by the usual mobs in the Middle East, including the one of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. "We absolutely respect our customers' right to choose what they wish to read and buy and we support the First Amendment," some mush-mouthed PR hack at Borders told the Associated Press. "And we absolutely support the rights of Free Inquiry to publish the cartoons. We've just chosen not to carry this particular issue in our stores." What kind of bigots run this company that they assume American Muslims would riot and attempt to behead people who purchased this magazine? So... there's the answer to any group that wants to block ideas that they oppose. The creationists and intelligent design folk can threaten to kill anyone who reads any book about Darwin or evolution. Abortion supporters can threaten to stone to death anyone who reads anything published by abortion opponents. In turn, abortion opponents can threaten to stone to death anyone who reads any book that makes reference to Roe v. Wade. What if a Catholic was upset about the blasphemy of the Da Vinci Code... would Borders remove all books by Dan Brown? So I wrote an e-mail to both Borders and Waldenbooks to let them know that I would no longer shop at any of their stores I also asked them if they were planning on scheduling weekly book burnings.
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