Liberal humanists make an important distinction between respecting someone’s beliefs, and respecting their right to hold and convey those beliefs. So, for example, when someone holds the noxious belief that it was not the Third Reich that caused the Holocaust, but the US, Britain, and allied powers, as historian David Irving does, the Jeffersonian thing to do is to defend his right to hold (and publish) this belief, even while condemning it.

This is a difficult thing to do, and writers such as Johann Hari and Christopher Hitchens (each of whose flaws I never tire of enumerating) should be given credit for coming to the defense of Irving’s right to be a Holocaust denier (Irving is English, and thus has no right to protected speech, except for the relatively toothless provisions of the UN Charter on Human Rights.) There is no greater test of one’s commitment to free speech than defense of the thing most hateful to you. [...]