The free speech absolutists at the New York Times editorial page have come out in recent days in favor of the proposition that both makers of realistic-looking child pornography and terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al Qaeda are entitled to wide protection under the First Amendment. On the child pornography, the Times sided against a seven to two Supreme Court majority that included Justices Stevens and Breyer. On the terrorism, the Times was criticizing Senator Lieberman. “It is profoundly disturbing that an influential senator would even consider telling a media company to shut down constitutionally protected speech,” the Times said.

The editorial came the same week as a report released by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center. The report documented that the terrorist organization Hezbollah collects contributions by Web sites hosted by American Internet service providers, and it details the bank accounts at Dresdner Bank and BLC Bank through which donations can be made.

We can respect a principled absolutist position on free speech. But the Times gave its game away with another editorial calling for stricter regulation of campaign speech in America. If the Times had its way, terrorists and those peddling life-like child pornography would have the full protection of the First Amendment, while the National Rifle Association, the AFL-CIO, the Sierra Club, and ordinary Americans seeking to fund political speech or engage in it in the midst of an American political campaign would be subject to all sorts of red tape and outright prohibitions.

In today’s New York Sun our Josh Gerstein reports on how the Environmental Defense Action Fund may have run afoul of the Times’s favored campaign speech restrictions known as McCain-Feingold with an ad that states “Tell Speaker Pelosi we need a strong global warming bill now.” How is it that peddlers of images of young children engaged in crude sex acts, or those fundraising for weapons with which to murder Jews, should in the Times’s world be protected by free speech, while environmentalists advocating for climate-change laws should be tied up in red tape?

It’s enough to make a person think that what the Times is really concerned about isn’t defending free speech at all, but defending the enemies of Israel and the purveyors of sexualized images of our children. Maybe they have a special axe to grind against Senator Lieberman, who, the other night before a huge crowd at the Commentary dinner, referred to the Times as a “once-great newspaper.” But if it were free speech the Times were concerned about, it would oppose the restrictions on political speech, too. Surely that is what the founders had in mind when they framed the First Amendment.