By the way, where the hell is this much-vaunted blogosphere? If three freshman congressmen from Wisconsin hinted that they wanted to regulate the use of umlauts on the internet in honor of Leif Ericson’s birthday, bloggers would be on the steps of Congress up-ending cans of gasoline on themselves in protest at such an infringement on free speech. But here we have all three branches of the government severely restricting independent speech outside of the dinosaurs of Old Media and the relative silence – minus a few noble exceptions (The Volokh conspiracy, Instapundit) – is deafening
You may think this is all fine or even necessary, and we can have that argument. But at least have the courage to admit that it’s censorship – censorship you like.
Beat ya to it.
You also said:
But political speech is what the First Amendment is about. The artistic types who think yanking a taxpayer-financed bit of sacrilege from a public museum’s wall may have every right to be angry about government censorship of art, but art wasn’t what the First Amendment was primarily designed to protect. The First Amendment was first and foremost designed to protect the expression of overtly political speech, of criticism of the government and elected officials.
Beat ya to that, too. My home page has said for years:
It is sometimes more important to think about what you are going to say (and perhaps refrain from saying it) than to say it without thinking about it first. This is particularly important in political speech. Not that our “modern” politicians understand the concept. At any rate that is why this site flies a green ribbon rather than the more commonly-viewed blue one that a lot of techie sites display these days.
Note that the Founders 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. And now that George W. Bush is President and the Republicans control Congress (well…OK, the House, thank you very much Jim Jeffords), we don’t have to worry about Bill Clinton’s SS (Secret Service) goons doing that to us anymore.
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 seems recently to have had a hard time understanding…
The problem, of course, is finding these intelligent people 🙂
I haven’t changed my attitude. Glad to see you agree with it. (Hmm…I need to update that now that we control the Senate again…this was actually written about the time the Clintons had the Secret Service detain and question two people at the Chicago airport who had the temerity to tell him what they thought of him, which is why it refers to Presidents in the same breath as performance art, and it’s been modified since.)