Free speech?  We all appreciate it; we all, in principle, endorse it.  As one who spent time in Berkeley during its Sixties days, I know the parameters of its discussions intimately.  That's why I was troubled to read about the protests mounted to prevent author Anne Coulter from speaking on the Berkeley campus a few weeks ago.
     While I do not in any way applaud Coulter's attitudes toward those with whom she disagrees, and I certainly do not condone her incendiary rhetoric, I believe that she, like all of us, is a creature made in the image of God.  Despite what I consider to be her aberrant perspectives on many individuals and their ideas, Coulter is, like you and me, a being loved by the one who created her.  She is as deeply flawed--and as magnificently designed--as all of us.
     Therein is our dilemma.  We appreciate what God has made, yet we recoil at how it often seems to be so wrong.  That's life in a fallen world.  We cannot judge Coulter nor, outside a legitimate court of law weighing legitimat laws, can we judge anyone else.  Let her speak, let everyone speak.  Just as Psalm 19 states that the heavens "are telling the glory of God," so let the earth on which we live speak with the confusing cacophony of the human creation.
     After all, it's only us--and God.