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To: conservatism_IS_compassion
Just an FYI...DU is "archiving" this thread as proof that Freepers want to do away with the First Amendment.

We may want to put some thoughts to "enlighten" those that don't read properly.

DU thread here...shower after leaving

37 posted on 09/16/2001 11:08:55 AM PDT by Dakotabound
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To: Dakotabound
"archiving" this thread as proof that Freepers want to do away with the First Amendment.

Really? Thank you for informing me--what an honor! If people from there are being directed to read this thread, they may perchance actually learn something about the First Amendment. It therefore seems germane to paste in a copy of that much-honored--all too often in the breach--stricture:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,
and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Notice if you will, dear reader, that the terms "objectivity" and "truth" appear nowhere in the First Amendment (nor, I warrant, anywhere else in the Constitution). The Constitution forbids the government to assure that speech and the press contain only the truth. That means that the First Amendment protects your opinion from government censorship. It also--and this is a difficult concept for liberals to grasp--protects my opinion from government censorship even if my opinion is not "liberal". Not only so, but the same goes for members of the Flat Earth Society with whom both you and I disagree.

That is the only logical position for the Constitution of our democratic republic to take; if the government were actually able to promulgate only truth and to stamp out error and error only, what point would there be to having elections in which people who might be wrong could overturn the existing perfect government? Yet we-the-people allow the government--in the form of the FCC--to tell us which of our countrymen speak over the government-created airwaves "in the public interest." If the First Amendment is truly properly understood to allow that, why is it also properly understood to forbid the government to make that same decision about newspapers or books?

One or the other of those two understandings is deeply flawed. I say it is the former.

I also say that, however competitive various journalists may be among themselves, they have a remarkable amount in common among themselves as well. And that what they have in common with each other they also, by and large, have in common with liberal politicians and not with conservatives. And if liberal politicians eschew the adoption of policy preferences which diverge significantly from journalistic concensus, any claim of journalists in general to be independent of liberal politicans is moot.

39 posted on 09/16/2001 2:01:28 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
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To: Dakotabound
Your #37, my #39:

On reflection the thing to understand about "liberals" who discuss the Constitution is that most of their references to it belong in quotes. Here is the present case, and my argument precisely on First Amendment grounds is critiqued as an attack on the "First Amendment."

But they do not mean the text as written but what they wish that text said--and what they arrogantly pretend that it does say. The liberal "First Amendment" says that Christianity should be viewed with suspicion by the government--not the other way around, as intended. The liberal "First Amendment" says that political parties' campaign activities can be subsidized for the purpose of controling them.

The liberal "First Amendment" says that a concensus of the powerful (i.e., "the establishment") determines truth--especially the WRT the lie that journalism is not the establishment.

If you listened to Mr. Gore talk about judicial nominees during the 2000 campaign, he promised to uphold the "Constitution"--his meaning, pretty explicity, was that liberals were not to be bound by any inconvenient strictures of the actual text of the Constitution.

48 posted on 09/20/2001 4:08:46 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
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