Americans love to complain. We consider it our God-given right, directly implied by if not specifically mentioned in the First Amendment to our Constitution. What good would freedom of speech be if we couldn’t employ it to point out just how screwed up the government, the news media, and those misguided individuals who practice a different religion than us are?

As a newspaper columnist, complaining is my bread and butter. Try a little experiment: keep track of how many editorial columns you read this week consist mainly of the author detailing how misguided some individual, group, or way of thinking is. My guess is it’ll be north of 80 percent.

But sometimes I think it is important to take stock of just how lucky we are to live in this country, and what a good thing we have going here. Sometimes it takes a news story from a distant land to make one realize that you’re glad you live here and not there.

Take for example the widely reported two-day conference held in Tehran, Iran, this week where “scholars” from around the world gathered to promote the idea that the Holocaust never happened, or that it was at least greatly exaggerated. Dangerously unbalanced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hosted the conference with an eye toward providing a platform for researchers and historians who are unable to carry on their Holocaust-denying information campaigns in their home countries due to political pressure and/or the fact that they are a bunch of kooks.

But the fact that this conference happened wasn’t what was remarkable to me. Everyone knows that Ahmadinejad despises Americans and Jews and will do whatever he can to promote their downfall. The more interesting part of the story, for me, came when the list of attendees from other countries was reported.

From the United States, former Ku Klux Klansman and Louisiana state legislator David Duke was there to represent the worst in all of us. Let’s hope he likes it over there well enough to stay. Forever.

Europe was also tragically well represented. One reason the European contingent was so healthy is that in many of their home countries they can be (and many of them have been) arrested for questioning the commonly accepted historical record of the Holocaust. Think about that for a minute. In Europe, our partner in democracy in a dark and hostile world, you can go to jail for expressing an opinion.

I don’t care how misinformed, ill-considered, or bigoted a person’s opinion is, you don’t lock them up for having bad thoughts. To do so is to knock down one of the basic pillars of a democratic system of government.

As much as I detest David Duke and those of his ilk, I am just as disturbed at the thought of living in a country where people like him are arrested and convicted because of their hateful and poorly informed opinions. We should all be thankful that we live in a place where his stupidity is shunned, but not prosecuted. (Apologies to Johnny Depp and Gwyneth Paltrow on this one.)

We may argue over the finer points of the freedom of speech, from flag-burning to religious expression in government settings, but we tend to shy away from passing laws that simply outlaw the expression of certain ideas in any setting.

This may sound arrogant, but we’re simply better than that. May it ever be so.

Bill Ferguson is a columnist for The Macon (Ga.) Telegraph.