Credit: Steve Petteway, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States.
There hasn't been much the current U.S. Supreme Court has done that strikes me as right, and reasonable, but this week they've hit two opinions that have been somewhat heartening.
The first was the decision that found corporations have no right to privacy when dealing with the government and regulators (AT&T had sought to keep public records sealed). This was a bit of a surprise given its earlier ruling on campaign spending that effectively equated corporations (and unions, which regular readers of this blog know I support at a genetic level) with individuals, and thus they have the right to spend what they want in political campaigns. Our republic is the worse for that one - elections are expressions of voters' sentiments, and giving corporations and unions free rein to spend perverts what should be a discussion among individual voters.
Then the Supremes followed with a dicier, but right, call in the case of those highly objectionable morons, the Phelps family, who run around the country proclaiming that God hates everything - including soldiers killed in foreign combat. It's an emotional issue, and today's ruling that protects the rights of the noxious to speak has lit up social media sites (my comments here, in fact, are reprised from a discussion on my Facebook page).
There are many reasonable people who believe the Phelpses should be muzzled, especially when they protest outside military funerals. My sentiments are with the families of the dead, but we as a society have to move beyond the emotional and stand with the protesters' right to protest, as noxious and twisted as they might be.
The problem lies in who gets to define the conditions under which free speech can be abrogated. I despise these protesters, same as I despised the neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois, a generation ago. But their First Amendment right to free speech is inviolable, as hateful as the exercise of it might be. Years ago there was a group in the midwest somewhere that found an ingenious way to shut the Klan up. Rather than counter-protest, they collected pledges of dollars for every minute the Klansmen talked at a public rally, all the money to go to the United Negro College Fund. They sent one person with a stopwatch. The Klansmen blathered into emptiness, and the longer they spewed racist drivel the more money they raised to educate young African Americans. The demonstrations ended. Similar creativity would go a long way toward countering the Phelpses of the world without infringing on our already tenuous Constitutional rights (you'll read about some of that abuse when The Fear Within comes out next month).
Guaranteeing a quiet funeral is too high a price to pay for eroding the FIrst Amendment. A friend raised the argument that France has laws against anti-Semitic speech, and their democracy seems strong. It's a valid point by comparison, but again the issue centers on who gets to define the noxious speech - in that case, anti-Semitism. Is a political diatribe against Israeli policy toward the Palestinians anti-Semitic, as some Israelis often interpret it? Would that be illegal in France? Can we know what speech has been muzzled if it is never spoken? You can't measure a void. It's better, I think, to embrace the broadest rights possible and suffer the indignities of those who abuse it.
The First Amendment needs to be upheld at a remove from emotion. I oppose the death penalty; were the victim a close friend or family member, I'd likely want vengeance. That doesn't make the death penalty right. I feel for the agony and frustration of the families of the dead enduring this crap. But again, the greater good here is defending as absolute a right to free speech as possible. It is how we protect these liberties when they are under stress that determines our national character. I don't agree with this court on much, but I do on this issue.
The first was the decision that found corporations have no right to privacy when dealing with the government and regulators (AT&T had sought to keep public records sealed). This was a bit of a surprise given its earlier ruling on campaign spending that effectively equated corporations (and unions, which regular readers of this blog know I support at a genetic level) with individuals, and thus they have the right to spend what they want in political campaigns. Our republic is the worse for that one - elections are expressions of voters' sentiments, and giving corporations and unions free rein to spend perverts what should be a discussion among individual voters.
Then the Supremes followed with a dicier, but right, call in the case of those highly objectionable morons, the Phelps family, who run around the country proclaiming that God hates everything - including soldiers killed in foreign combat. It's an emotional issue, and today's ruling that protects the rights of the noxious to speak has lit up social media sites (my comments here, in fact, are reprised from a discussion on my Facebook page).
There are many reasonable people who believe the Phelpses should be muzzled, especially when they protest outside military funerals. My sentiments are with the families of the dead, but we as a society have to move beyond the emotional and stand with the protesters' right to protest, as noxious and twisted as they might be.
The problem lies in who gets to define the conditions under which free speech can be abrogated. I despise these protesters, same as I despised the neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois, a generation ago. But their First Amendment right to free speech is inviolable, as hateful as the exercise of it might be. Years ago there was a group in the midwest somewhere that found an ingenious way to shut the Klan up. Rather than counter-protest, they collected pledges of dollars for every minute the Klansmen talked at a public rally, all the money to go to the United Negro College Fund. They sent one person with a stopwatch. The Klansmen blathered into emptiness, and the longer they spewed racist drivel the more money they raised to educate young African Americans. The demonstrations ended. Similar creativity would go a long way toward countering the Phelpses of the world without infringing on our already tenuous Constitutional rights (you'll read about some of that abuse when The Fear Within comes out next month).
Guaranteeing a quiet funeral is too high a price to pay for eroding the FIrst Amendment. A friend raised the argument that France has laws against anti-Semitic speech, and their democracy seems strong. It's a valid point by comparison, but again the issue centers on who gets to define the noxious speech - in that case, anti-Semitism. Is a political diatribe against Israeli policy toward the Palestinians anti-Semitic, as some Israelis often interpret it? Would that be illegal in France? Can we know what speech has been muzzled if it is never spoken? You can't measure a void. It's better, I think, to embrace the broadest rights possible and suffer the indignities of those who abuse it.
The First Amendment needs to be upheld at a remove from emotion. I oppose the death penalty; were the victim a close friend or family member, I'd likely want vengeance. That doesn't make the death penalty right. I feel for the agony and frustration of the families of the dead enduring this crap. But again, the greater good here is defending as absolute a right to free speech as possible. It is how we protect these liberties when they are under stress that determines our national character. I don't agree with this court on much, but I do on this issue.