During his first foreign trip since becoming Sec. of State, John Kerry told students in Berlin that in America, "you have a right to be stupid."
"As a country, as a society, we live and breathe the idea of religious freedom and religious tolerance, whatever the religion, and political freedom and political tolerance, whatever the point of view," Kerry told the German students at the second stop on his trip, according to Reuters.
"People have sometimes wondered about why our Supreme Court allows one group or another to march in a parade even though it's the most provocative thing in the world and they carry signs that are an insult to one group or another," he added.
"The reason is, that's freedom, freedom of speech. In America you have a right to be stupid - if you want to be," he told the students, who began to laugh. "And you have a right to be disconnected to somebody else if you want to be.
"And we tolerate it. We somehow make it through that. Now, I think that's a virtue. I think that's something worth fighting for," he added. "The important thing is to have the tolerance to say, you know, you can have a different point of view."
Before visiting Berlin, Kerry was in London, and now he is headed for Paris, Rome, Ankara, Cairo, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Doha before returning to Washington on March 6.
Kerry also spoke to U.S. diplomats earlier in the day, talking about the time he spent in Berlin in the 1950s with is father, an American diplomat.
"I used to have great adventures. My bicycle and I were best friends. And I biked all around this city. I remember biking down Kurfuerstendamm [West Berlin's main shopping avenue] and seeing nothing but rubble. This was in 1954 ... the war was very much still on people's minds," he said, according to Reuters.
"One day, using my diplomatic passport, I biked through the checkpoint right into the east sector and noticed very quickly how dark and unpopulated (it was) and sort of unhappy people looked," he added, saying it left an impression "that hit this 12-year-old kid."
"I kind of felt a foreboding about it and I didn't spend much time. I kind of skedaddled and got back out of there and went home and proudly announced to my parents what I had done and was promptly grounded and had my passport pulled," he added.
"As a 12-year-old, I saw the difference between East and West," he said when he re-told the story to the diplomats, Reuters reported. "I never made another trip like that. But I have never forgotten it. And now, it's vanished, vanished."
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