The analogy is a tough one to work with because the word "nigger" has a lot of historical baggage, and is connected to and used by a lot of groups with very vio

The analogy is a tough one to work with because the word "nigger" has a lot of historical baggage, and is connected to and used by a lot of groups with very violent histories. So it's tough to say what I'd do if someone who was honestly racist, and was perpetuating a violence-laden dialogue of racism, started getting death threats. That might seem like par for the course. But if they were a comedian who used it as part of a routine, in a venue that most people understand to be one of satire, then I might very well think that the cost of offending a lot of people in order to express solidarity with them, and rub it in the face of violent extremists, was worth it. It depends a lot on the context and how much worse the person making the offensive statement is than the violent extremists. In the case of the Muhammad cartoons, I think the original cartoonist may have definitely had some race issues, but you'd have to use a logarithmic scale of crazy in order to plot where he falls versus the people who decided it was worth killing over. So in that particular situation I'm solidly on the side of cartoonists, even if the first one was in poor taste. The response was so disproportionate to the original offense that I'm willing to set aside good taste temporarily in order to make it clear that using the threat of death to push your religious morality is totally not OK.