We live in interesting times, something the Chinese recognize as a curse, and everyday seems to bring an upheaval or reorientation to things we thought set in stone. Recently, that most sacred of all our American rights, free speech, has come under attack from both the left and right.  While bipartisanship is a much wished for commodity in our riven times, in this case it  demonstrates that even when sharing a common concept, Liberals and Conservatives are worlds apart.

From the right, Newt Gingrich is advocating  the limiting of speech as a weapon to hinder terrorists in their recruiting and planning of attacks on American soil. While admirable aspirations,  the slippery slope of what  he proposes is more like a cliff which drops hundreds of feet.  We all would like to stop the terrorists, and the thought that they are out there planning massive destruction on our country causes all kind of thoughts to arise which reflect our desperation to just do something to stop them, but if you take a step back and consider most of them reasonably, you  realize that they are useless or worse, an infringement, indeed a corruption, of what makes us special. To attempt to restrict the ability of madmen to recruit or plan, especially using the Internet,  by limiting speech would entail restrictions that could not but expand beyond anything originally envisioned, and if ever the law of  unintended consequences should cause us to stop journeying down a certain path, the this is that time. Mr. Speaker your goals are admirable and your frustration shared, but this idea is a time bomb which could hurt us worse than anything we are seeking to prevent.

Having said that, there are limits to free speech which should be respected in the name of national security.  To understand this, we have to understand what we mean by free speech. Basically, it means the government should not restrict what we say but over time even that has been modified, so  for instance that famous  "yelling fire in a crowded movie" is not covered. Thus there exists precedents for limiting speech that is considered dangerous, however that is defined, and I guess that who is doing the defining is part of the problem. However, on the whole, the government is not allowed to stop you from saying something. Yet that doesn't mean you can say anything and not face consequences. For instance, Libel laws say if you slander someone they can seek punishment, and treason laws ensure you will be punished [unless you are the NY Times it seems] for revealing certain state secrets. I have to admit that I find it hard to differentiate between speech which is forbidden by the government and speech which is punished under government issued laws if uttered, but I  assume that technical and legal niceties allow the First Amendment to be upheld in word if not spirit, Or maybe I am wrong, and free speech is abrogated a lot more often then we realize. Once you begin thinking about it , it is not as clear as you first thought. Welcome to interesting times.

Another point I would like to make before examining the recent Liberal attack on the First Amendment is that just because you can say something doesn't give it value or pertinence. Indeed, the whole concept of free speech is that in the "marketplace of ideas" the good ones and the bad ones will be separated, and the bad ones thrown out with the trash. Unfortunately, many people, especially Liberals, have come to assume that all speech  has value and , even once disparaged , should be maintained and propagated, at least when it serves their purposes.  All the instances of leftist professors reviling the obvious facts about the WTC bombings is a particular sore point with me. Yes, the government should not, and did not, stop them from speaking out, but once they made their points known and all intelligent people rejected them and objected to their children being taught  nonsense, the offending propaganda should have been stopped by someone or something. The market had spoken but still the MSM and Liberals refused to  accept this, and so the lies still live. There must be a mechanism to allow the marketplace of ideas to rid itself of speech which has been tried and found wanting, but the Left can keep them alive indefinitely, and so we are inundated with hogwash we would rather allocate to the dustbin. A defective car is recalled and fixed, but a defective idea can be splashed across the The NY Times for as long as the publisher wants. Maybe what needs modifying is not the first Amendment but the mechanism for enforcing the opinion of the American republic regarding repugnant ideas. Again, I always fear the law of unintended consequences [ which I feel should be enshrined as the first Commandment of the Conservative movement], and maybe there is no good way to do this short of censorship, something I abhor the thought of because of my fear of the tyranny of the masses. We may just have to accept that the system is not perfect, but we all knew that anyway.

Before I end this seemingly endless diatribe, I do want to mention the Left's newest attack on speech, this one coming from the esteemed Jesse Jackson, who wants to basically outlaw the  derogatory term for Blacks [ I was going to be politically correct and say Black Americans but I assume Jackson doesn't want it used for any person of African heritage, and I didn't have enough space to say Black-Brazilian, Black-Chinese, Black-Swiss, etc.] that Michael Richards recently used.  Now I am not defending it's use, but the truth is that here we have the usual Liberal response to something they don't like, and their usual failure to realize that non objectionable speech doesn't need protection and  that the First Amendment is for that language which someone would seek to suppress.  If I didn't defend Gingrich's attempt to restrict speech for national security, you must know I am not going to defend this Liberal attempt to prevent  a group from being offended , and for the same reasons as I discussed above [ slippery slope and all that]. However, in the context of my reservations about the limits of the "marketplace of ideas" to weed out the offensive or false ideas, I think it is worth noting that in this case the system has worked [when was the last time you saw the MSM use this word?], and its use has been marginalized to individuals who may be bigots or angry or whatever. Jackson's attempt to hound this word to extinction is just another example of the Liberal's ongoing effort to create their absolutely perfect world, and if censorship may be the outcome, well as long as its the other guy's ideas that are outlawed they have no problem with that.

So  there you have it. The Right attacks the First Amendment for national security purposes, armed with the evidence that the MSM is not going to police itself or be troubled by little concerns like truth or imminent danger, the Left seeks to restrict speech so as to totally eliminate a word used on the margins of society by troubled individuals. I guess on second thought, while I am troubled by both efforts, the Right's reasoning is a lot more understandable and justified, but isn't that usually the case?