By all means, freedom of speech.

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Just don't be surprised when someone slugs you for saying something assholish at the wrong place and/or time.

Joe mentions what the First Amendment wasn't created to do.  He's right.  Except he's right because the Framers did not intend the First Amendment to mean that you had a God-given right to say anything you wanted without limitation. (Or "express" yourself any way you wanted, which is a completely different misinterpretation.) They meant that you had a God-given right to stand up in the town square and say that the King was a bloody-handed tyrant without worrying about the Redcoats hustling you off to jail.  Anything else was on your own dime.

Most intelligent people today are fairly certain that the Founders did NOT intend to protect profanity, pornography, performance art, or Presidents when they wrote the First Amendment -- much as they did not mean that only the Army could bear weapons when they wrote the Second. Then of course there's the unreasonable search and seizure bit in the Fourth Amendment that OSHA has in the past had a hard time understanding...and then there's McCain-Feingold and the problems it engenders.

The First Amendment, as my daddy used to tell me, was intended to protect political speech.  Any responsible American alive at the time that the Bill of Rights was written and adopted knew what the suppression of political speech led to. 

Those today who opine that the First Amendment couldn't possibly encompass our modern world of instant communication simply don't understand what the First Amendment was designed to encompass.  Even if George Mason his own bad self had known about the telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet, he would have said, "So what?  The only speech we're trying to protect is the right to tell your government to piss off and leave you alone, or out will come the tar and pitchforks and we'll make you leave us alone."  Or something similar but more appropriate to the age.

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Thanks for the link.

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