In a free society, the rights of believers in any faith do not extend to imposing the tenets of that faith on non-believers. Some of those who resist doctrinal imposition will be free thinkers who resist all dogma. But sometimes the resister will be just a different kind of narrow-minded fanatic. Samuel F.B. Morse, the future inventor of the telegraph, told a story about coming upon a papal procession when he visited Rome as a young man. A fervent Protestant, he refused to raise his hat to the pope and was, he claimed, knocked down by one of the pope’s Swiss guards. Maybe it happened, and maybe it didn’t. (Morse was always vague about the exact where and when of the incident.) Morse wrote a Geller-like pamphlet denouncing the Catholic church as a “foreign conspiracy against the liberties of the United States” and ran for mayor of New York City in 1836 on a nativist, anti-Catholic platform. Mercifully, he was decisively beaten. Yet if modern Americans can choose for themselves whether and how to greet a minister of religion, they owe some of that liberty to loudmouthed cranks like Morse.

When vigilantes try to enforce the tenets of a faith by violence, then it becomes a civic obligation to stand up to them. And if the people doing the standing up are not in every way nice people—if they express other views that are ugly and prejudiced by any standard—then the more shame on all the rest of us for leaving the job to them.