PARIS, France -- Although I grew up almost in Joe McCarthy's backyard and attended a Catholic school that used bowdlerized history books, I've always believed that freedom of speech was absolute -- a principle to be cherished above all and defended with the last drop of the last redblooded American's blood.

Well, hush my mouth!

As it turns out, according to democratic leaders everywhere, the freedoms set forth in the Bill of Rights are not Commandments. They're more like "guidelines."

In this fresh new outlook, "respect for religion" -- even if the religious are prone to bombing buses, mutilating women, shooting doctors, murdering children and practicing genocide -- is more sacred than freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and religion (ironic, huh?) and the other liberties granted to Americans (and copied by other nations) on December 15, 1791.

A veritable geyser of anti-free speech speech followed the depiction, by a Danish cartoon, of the prophet Muhammad with a bomb-shaped turban. It gushed from an all-star cast of "democratic" leaders — British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Prime Minister Tony Blair, Swedish P.M. Goran Persson, Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Jacques Chirac, the U.S. State Department and President George W. Bush. There were others, of course.

The Bill of Rights' only defenders were Denmark's beleaguered Prime Minister, and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, who said: "It's better to publish too much than not to have freedom." Oh, those hotblooded Spaniards!.

The consensus, endorsed by publishers and politicians, is that free speech is nice, but inadvisable when it might irritate the sort of religious nuts who tend to react by burning Pizza Huts and beheading tourists -- then blaming it all on whoever pissed them off. The increasingly popular "tut-tut" school of not-so-free speech was nutshelled by Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, President of Indonesia: "The rights of press freedom are not absolute. Whatever the faith, we must respect it."

Granted, the point America's Founders were making with the Bill of Rights was that various religions had spent eons viciously silencing rival faiths, but America was going to be the place where anyone could glorify, disparage or disregard any belief -- with the full protection of the government. "Say what you want," said Jefferson and Hamilton, Ben Franklin and George Mason. "We got your back."

That was then. This is now.

Now, the Religious Right occupies the Oval Office. Throughout the world, the streets flow with the blood of the insufficiently pious. Leaders are biting their tongues, lest they ignite a sectarian carnage that plunges humanity into a lake of fire.

And I say the last hope for the Bill of Rights is: Don't fight 'em. Join 'em.

This is easier than it looks. One of the world's newer religious hits -- Scientology -- is based on space fiction. Another worships a fat Korean who marries hordes of strangers in football stadiums. There are "churches" dedicated to white supremacy, black separatism and singing the Mass in Latin. Plus, we got voodoo, Satanism, black magic and Harry Potter. I cannot believe the IRS would hesitate for a heartbeat before granting tax-exempt status to the Holy Temple of the Bill of Rights.

The beauty part of turning free speech into a religion is that it removes from Constitutional guarantees the onus of balancing rights with "responsibilities." Today, secular speakers are warned -- by world leaders -- to button their lip, lest they antagonize zealots to do crazy stuff in defense of the faith. Meanwhile, every president from Bush to Ahmadinejad agrees that religion, unlike politics, is responsibility-free. True believers can run amok at will -- and they do!

It's time for civil libertarians to join the party.

The Bill of Rights has more religious facets -- built-in -- than most existing creeds. It already has lots of shrines, from Hyde Park Corner to the Lincoln Memorial. Its martyrs are anyone who's ever been killed (often by religions) for shooting off his mouth. This includes two already established saints, Joan of Arc and Thomas More. Also eligible: St. Socrates, St. Abe Lincoln, St. John Brown, St. Gandhi, St. Sacco and St. Vanzetti., St. Malcolm X, St. Martin Luther King, St. Bobby Kennedy, St. Steve Biko, St. Oscar Romero of San Salvador, St. Fritz Gerlach (the first editor murdered by Hitler). And all those dead kids in Tiananmen Square. We can even claim Jesus and St. Peter -- crucified, after all, because they talked too much and rankled the Romans!

More religious heroes include the merely jailed, tortured, censored, shunned (or trashed by Karl Rove) for excess candor. Galileo and DaVinci. Robert Bork and Anita Hill. Orwell and Salinger. James Joyce and Sylvia Beach. Eugene V. Debs, Edward R. Murrow, Jimmy Carter, Trent Lott, Howard Dean, John McCain and Hillary Clinton. Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Leon Trotsky. Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and George Carlin. Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt. Muhammad Ali and Muhammad Mossadegh. Jimmy Stewart in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," Henry Fonda in "The Grapes of Wrath," Al Pacino in "And Justice For All" — and the Dixie Chicks! The list is endless.

Where would we worship? We could try town halls and storefronts, or just use soapboxes strewn hither and yon. But I'd lean toward bars -- taverns, lounges, roadhouses, pubs and dives -- where free speech is rarely hindered and often (indulgently) ignored, but always protected fiercely by the guy behind the bar. Suddenly, you'd see signs like "The Elbow Room (and) First Chapel of the Bill of Rights," or "The Dew Drop Inn (and) Basilica of St. Thomas More." Every bartender would be ordained in the Temple of the Bill. Also eligible for priesthood would be editors -- print editors. Web editors and TV talking heads would be eligible only after passing a literacy test. Dan Rather, however, would be an Honorary Bishop. Cronkite would be the first Pope.

As for holy days of obligation, well, we'd reinstate Lincoln's Birthday. We'd celebrate December 15, and the Fourth of July, and... OK, anybody know when was I.F. Stone born?

David Benjamin is a Paris-based novelist and journalist. His latest book is The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked.

###