Posted on 09/10/2001 12:04:02 PM PDT by StriperSniper
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QUESTION TO THE MEDIA
is the Bill of Rights "anti-government" too? Dorothy Anne Seese 09.10.01 This is a general question to those reporters and editorialists who love to toss around the phrase "anti-government" when citizens or citizens groups challenge their individual, property or other rights when a government agency takes action. The Bill of Rights states what powers and rights belong to the people, upon which the government may not trespass. Does that make the Bill of Rights "anti-government?" If not, why not? Why is it that individuals and groups who assert their rights under the Bill of Rights become "anti-government"? The Bill of Rights gives to us, as citizens, certain rights upon which the government may not infringe, and when we assert those rights, you, the media, immediately attach to us the label "anti-government." If the Bill of Rights gives us our rights, and it is still the law of the land, then are you guilty of libel when you label people who invoke such rights as "anti-government"? Maybe that's one that should be tested in a court of law. You're banking on the lack of funding behind people's groups to keep them out of a court of law in such tests, or you, the media, would not be so careless about the invective with which you label people who merely stand up for what our founding fathers gave us to protect us from government oppression. You use your First Amendment rights of freedom of the press. If some of us use our right of freedom of speech, we're "anti-government." Dual standard for the fourth estate versus the common man? Or it is just that you, the liberal media, are so bent on taking our Bill of Rights away from us that short of labeling the Bill of Rights itself as "anti-government" you attach the label to those of us who dare .... dare ... to defend our rights against government intrusion? Do you, the media, realize that fully two-thirds of the laws now on the books in the United States would likely be declared unconstitutional if put to the test by a fair and just Supreme Court? That if we had elected constitutionally-conscious representatives as our lawmakers, such laws would not be laws today? Or is that an anti-government question? Your freedom of the press is abused by your use of it to intimidate, label, libel and malign United States citizens who invoke their constitutional rights. Pravda could do no better, and Xinhua, the state-controlled Chinese press, could do no worse! Is it any wonder that thinking Americans are turning to certain cable networks in the hope of obtaining honest information rather than biased reporting? Is it any wonder that newspaper circulation is dropping like a rock while internet news thrives? We not only need an honest government in this nation, we need an honest national media system, and if we had the latter, we might have the former! Now take the above and shove it down your anti-constitutional presses and think before you write or blather on the airwaves. I just exercised my First Amendment right of freedom of speech. |
If the Bill of Rights gives us our rights, and it is still the law of the land, then are you guilty of libel when you label people who invoke such rights as "anti-government"?
I hate to do this, because her heart is in the right place, but the Bill of Rights "gives" us nothing. It merely tells the government what they are NOT ALLOWED TO INFRINGE UPON - our God-given, inalienable rights.
Seemingly small point, but a critical one nevertheless...
Thank you for pointing that out for them.
I have to object to his. I'm an atheist, and I have never attempted to sway someone away from their religion. Some (the ones I call "anti-theists") do, but that's their problem. Much as there are religions that do not proselytize there also (actually the majority) atheists that do not. You don't hear much from us, we don't work for the ACLU.
It is generally governments of one stripe or another that have caused much of the needless suffering on this planet.
Stay well - Yorktown
Does that mean that I have to give up being either a conservative or an agnostic? Of course not.
How is this suddenly going to change? Will you purge all non-Christians from the right? Thomas Jefferson, David Horowitz, and I would beg to differ.
Glad you see it coming: "La ilaha illa Allah; Mohammed rasul Allah."
That is what you mean, isn't it?
Sounds fairly anti-government to me.
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