IT TAKES A FIERCELY CLOSED MIND...:

Seeing the "whole" of the Charlie Hebdo issue requires Donohue's message. Commenting on the ostensible goals of James Madison, the Father of our Constitution, poet Robert Frost once wrote: "Now I know--I think I know--what Madison's dream was. It was just a dream of a new land to fulfill with people in self-control. That is all through his thinking ... to fulfill this land--a new land--with people in self-control."

I believe that Frost's call for self-restraint--and Madison's--is no different from Donohue's. Thus, the plain difference between legality and morality must be arranged in its proper order. And Donohue did a phenomenal job in marking this emphasis during his heated interview with Hewitt.

Natural law is (and should be, if that matters) much more expansive than the positive, or human-made legislative, law. Thomas Aquinas wrote that "human laws do not by strict command prohibit every vicious action, just as they do not command every virtuous action."

This means that we enjoy many more legal rights than moral rights--which itself means that true liberty requires non-legislated self-restraint. Donohue got this 100 percent correct ... by saying repeatedly and unequivocally that he seeks "self-censorship" and not legislative censorship. (Through all 23 minutes, against Donohue's straightforward protests, Hewitt consistently recurred to a feigned presumption that Donahue invoked legislative censorship.)

In brief, liberty--as understood by the scholastic tradition--describes a moral freedom oriented to the good; license or false freedom is an abuse of true liberty because it employs freedom for its own sake. And license's false teleology renders it both amoral and indefensible, even while legal in certain cases. In the case of rightfully legal, yet licentious exercises of free speech--like Charlie Hebdo sodomy cartoons, according to Donohue--moral defensibility collapses, even as legal defensibility stands.

What does this mean in the case of Donohue's statements?

Now, Fox News' Megyn Kelly went after Donohue a little, but it was during the Hewitt interview that things grew very ugly very fast. Plainly, Hewitt chose to employ fishwives' shame tactics and to the presumptively infallible popular configuration of the event, instead of an honest or at least embattling line of inquiry.

Whereas Donohue came prepared to defend his statement in a logical and genteel (at least initially) manner, Hewitt couldn't suffer to have Donohue's reasoning pass as anything but shameworthy. In other words, Hewitt wanted to pin a line of ipse dixit, "we already decided you are bad" shame on Donohue. Hewitt couldn't "risk" the tempestuous sea of dialectics, and he seemed genuinely surprised that Donohue wanted to go there.

If any doubt about this was left to the listener, Hewitt sealed it by repeating four times throughout the 23-minute interview that "this is an interview, not a debate." While implying that all reason is reserved for debates and not interviews, Hewitt's tactic was clearly intended to deny Donohue an opportunity to engage in a reasoned dialogue over the moral limitations of freedom. By refusing to engage in a serious discussion, Hewitt conceded the weakness of his own feeble position.

Hewitt attacked Donohue with a rigorless verve that fell short of any vindication. In a genuinely artless blunder, Hewitt actually called it a "silly point" when Donohue articulated skillfully (under heavy fire) that "people have a legal right to insult ... Islam or any other religion, but they have no moral right to do so ... do you get that?!" Hewitt's answer, Mr. Donohue, is that he does not get it.

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