Category: First Amendment rights

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First Amendment rights

Speech Results

You often hear people who support campaign finance laws say that the First Amendment isn’t about money, “just speech.” These folks despise the Citizens United decision that forbade, under the First Amendment, regulation of groups of people (“corporations,” profit or non-​profit) pooling money to advertise and promote ideas and arguments and slogans and such.

Though many are First Amendment extremists on other matters, desiring no government interference of protests or movies or the Internet, when it comes to politics they fear “Big Money.” So they want to censor speech that some groups would push near elections.

It turns out, of course, that the effects of the Citizens United decision have been mostly beneficial, as Tim Cavanaugh points out in Reason. As a result of that infamous decision, local political races have been “shaken up”; the decision “guaranteed ‘big laughs’” in many humorous political commercials that were all-​too-​rare before; interest groups have been freed of the old yoke of the major parties; the GOP presidential nomination process has been made far more competitive; and even President Obama, the Citizens United critic-​in-​chief, has raised millions under the auspices of the organizations the decision allowed to operate — so he apparently likes it, too.

The blessings of “more speech” are pretty obvious — if one looks for them. But for those with a prohibitionist mindset, who fear a wide open public discussion, they’ll no doubt hate actual free speech. As protected by the Citizens United decision.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture

A Nickel’s Worth of Freedom

“If we are going to pay for your contraceptives,” said Rush Limbaugh on air, referring to Ms. Sandra Fluke’s congressional testimony, “and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch.”

In my Townhall column this weekend, “’Tis a Pity He’s a Boor,” I responded with a “No, thanks.” But I did defend what I took to be the point Rush was trying to make: “The issue isn’t about contraceptives, but the right to choose … on your own nickel.”

The flak Rush received became an avalanche of advertiser pull-​outs from his show. And an apology.

And this all points to something interesting about freedom.

Rush has freedom of speech. He would still have it if every advertiser in the world refused to touch him and he took to blogging. His freedom requires no one to support him. Free speech doesn’t force anyone to listen – or advertise.

Similarly, Ms. Fluke has freedom of association, sexually and otherwise, including her relationships with the university in question and its contracted insurance company. But such freedom doesn’t obligate her school or insurance company or other consumers (through passed-​on costs) to pay for her contraceptives. We all have freedom.

The same freedom of contract that allows advertisers to drop Rush’s show also allows businesses to choose employee benefit plans, workers to choose where they will work, and insurance companies to decide what terms they will offer.

Or it should. And in the specific case of contraception coverage did, until the Obama Administration dictated otherwise.

Several nasty words ago, that’s what started this brouhaha.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights ideological culture national politics & policies

Contra Mandated Contraception Coverage

Regulators spawned by “Obamacare” have mandated that employer-​provided medical insurance plans provide contraception as a benefit. 

The problem, as currently reported and debated, is that only churches are exempted — church-​run or ‑affiliated hospitals, for example, are not. And so Catholic hospitals, along with other religious-​based charitable endeavors, must conform, despite their commitment to age-​old ideas about the sanctity of life, which they say contraception and abortifacients, especially (some contraceptive methods are de facto abortion-​inducing), abridge.

Many conservatives argue that the mandate thus runs afoul of the First Amendment. But it turns out that many Republican politicians have supported similar mandates in several states.

Mike Huckabee signed one such mandate into law in Arkansas.

No big news that GOP politicians are often just as bad as Democrats, of course. But forget, if you can, the First Amendment angle. The mandate runs afoul of something even more fundamental: common sense.

Adding an umpteenth mandate to the list of regulations government places on contracts amongst employers, employees, and insurance companies hardly passes the smell test. The more benefits that government insists you contract for, the higher your insurance rates. The higher the rates, fewer are those who would willingly buy, thus scuttling the whole point of “health care reform.”

We ostensibly want more people to purchase major medical insurance. Not fewer.

It’s possible that some reformers seek precisely that, to put insurance companies out of business, leaving only government to take up the slack, as a “single payer.”

In the case of Republican reformers, however, is there a hidden agenda or just mere foolishness?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights

A Gift to Remember

On this very date in 1657, in the Dutch colony of New Netherland, 30 residents of Flushing (in what is today New York City) signed a petition, the Flushing Remonstrance, requesting an exemption to the ban on Quaker worship imposed by Peter Stuyvesant, the colony’s director-general.

None of the signers were themselves Quakers; they were English citizens opposed to the prohibition of religions other than the Dutch Reformed Church.

The Remonstrance stated:

You have been pleased to send unto us a certain prohibition or command that we should not receive or entertain any of those people called Quakers because they are supposed to be, by some, seducers of the people.…

Wee desire therefore in this case not to judge least we be judged, neither to condemn least we be condemned, but rather let every man stand or fall to his own Master.…

Therefore if any of these said persons come in love unto us, we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them, but give them free egresse and regresse unto our Town, and houses, as God shall persuade our consciences, for we are bounde by the law of God and man to doe good unto all men and evil to noe man.

Four of the signers were arrested; two, who refused to recant, imprisoned. Years later, signer John Bowne was arrested for allowing Quakers to meet in his house. He petitioned the directors of the Dutch West India Company, which ultimately “advised” Stuyvesant to end his religious persecution in the colony.

The Flushing petition served as an important precedent to the First Amendment’s provision guaranteeing freedom of worship. Americans of all religions (or none) owe those brave petitioners a debt — a debt best repaid by taking good care of our current freedoms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets general freedom government transparency

Secret Censorship

“There are so many things about this story that are crazy,” according to a detailed and exasperated report at Techdirt​.com, “it’s difficult to know where to start.”

What story? The one you’ve probably heard nothing about.

Back in late 2010, the federal government seized Dajaz1​.com, a popular Internet blog devoted to hip hop. The Justice Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shut down the website domain claiming it was infringing on music copyrights. ICE “put up a big scary warning graphic on the site, suggesting its operators were criminals.”

The government then failed to abide by the legal requirements for filing an asset forfeiture case, conducting a secret legal effort, instead. Motions, hearings, and court decisions were filed in secret and placed under “seal,” denying the website owners and their attorney any opportunity for challenge.

Freedom of speech? Due process of law? Obliterated. And yet, earlier this month, the government admitted it had no legitimate case, no probable cause to go after this website in the first place, and, after a year of censorship, finally returned the web domain to its rightful owners.

That a website can be seized by our government, without a charge being publicly made and the crime proven in a fair and open court of law, is absolutely frightening.

What’s even scarier, though, is that legislation currently being considered by Congress — Protect IP and the Stop Online Piracy Act — would give the federal government even more sweeping powers to regulate and control the Internet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture

Ninety-​Nine Percent Pure

Politics is dominated by pious, politic lies and half-​truths. Every nation has them, and Turkey’s are most impressive.

Turkey has been a vanguard, in the Muslim world, of “Westernizing” and “modernizing” tendencies. But it still has one foot in the deep past. One of its great pious half-​truths is that Turkey is “99 percent Muslim” yet possesses a “secular state” where “all religions are equal.”

With some religions more equal than others.

An Alevi spokesman, Izzettin Dogan, charges that the country “is actually a Sunni Islamic state.” There are 30 million Alevis in Turkey, according to the New York Times, and they are not alone in getting the short end of the stick in “secular Turkey”:

“The state collects taxes from all of us and spends billions on Sunni Islam alone, while millions of Alevis as well as Christians, Jews and other faiths don’t receive a penny,” Mr. Dogan said, referring to the $1.5 billion budget of the Religious Affairs Department. “What kind of secularism is that?”

Good question.

And it gets to the heart of one of the reasons I’m so happy to live in America. Our government may be a mess, but we still have some basic freedoms. We’ve long gotten over the ancient fixation on the union of religion and state.

In ancient empires, kings styled themselves as gods.

We know better. 

And we know better than to subsidize religion — or use it as a branch of the government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.