Congress
shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.
It is no accident that these words
are found in the very first lines of the Bill of Rights. To our Founders, who had just won the War of
Independence from Britain, these two freedoms were at the very essence of what
it means to be free of tyranny.
Somehow, some of their inheritors have forgotten that.
All of
us by now are nauseatingly familiar with stories of college students preventing
conservative speakers from addressing them in a public forum, or of their
demands for safe spaces free of any utterances offensive to their pre-pubescent
sensitivities. Perhaps we can blame the
liberal professors for the ignorance of their charges, but there is no excuse
for adults in leadership positions to exhibit such ignorance. Two glaring instances come to mind.
On March 9th Attorney
General Loretta Lynch admitted to a Senate Judiciary Committee that there had
been internal discussions regarding the possibility of pursuing civil actions
against climate-change deniers. Even
worse, she said she had asked the FBI to investigate whether climate-change
deniers meet criteria for which the Justice Department could take action. This request was not only absurd and
dangerous, but in clear violation of the First Amendment. Are we now to emulate the Stalinist Soviet
Union in suppressing scientists who disagree with debatable scientific
theories?
Meanwhile, we have Donald Trump who
says he will change the libel laws to make it easier for him to sue the press
when it attacks him. “I’m going to open
up our libel laws, so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false
articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.” Trump has a long history of litigation, but
now he wants to make money by gutting the First Amendment. With this he reveals not only his avarice,
but his ignorance of settled law, not to mention his disdain for the
Constitution.
Our Founders, who risked everything
to gain our freedom—We mutually pledge to
each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor--must be turning in
their graves.
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