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Who needs the First
Amendment? By Glenn Danforth © Copyright 1996 Glenn Danforth |
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| To most
Americans the First Amendment couldn’t be more sacred had Moses carried
it down from the mountain carved on stone tablets. Freedom of speech is
the principal our country was founded on. The same freedom that today allows Howard Stern to rant on the public airwaves once gave Martin Luther King the right to oppose the doctrine of separate but equal. The same First Amendment that protects Larry Flynt’s right to be as distasteful as he sees fit once protected Jane Addams and Susan B. Anthony in their struggle for woman suffrage. It’s easy to stand up for freedom of expression when you agree with the thoughts being expressed. In a utopian world where no one ever uttered an offensive word there would be no need for a First Amendment. Fortunately, in their infinite wisdom, our founding fathers realized that there would always exist a portion of the population who would attempt to force their religious and moral views on the rest of the population through the censorship of anything they believed distasteful. The freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution, those same freedoms Americans have laid their lives down in defense of, are, even today, under attack. There are many who wish to usurp the First Amendment by granting freedom of expression only to those whose beliefs aren't offensive. Like bigots who always try to cushion their racist statements with, “I have a lot of black friends, but...,” those of a book-burning mentality invariably couch their anti-First-Amendment rhetoric with words such  as, “I’m all for freedom of the press, but ...,”
or “I don’t believe in censorship, but ....”Inevitably those statements are followed by a call for censorship. People who advocate censorship never seem to grasp the concept that it was the First Amendment that guaranteed them the right to voice their objection in the first place. The First Amendment wasn’t designed to protect forms of expression we find pleasing; it was written to protect the right of citizens to express thoughts we find objectionable. While Americans may have disparate views on what is or isn’t offensive, there is one thing most Americans do find patently offensive and that is the idea of censorship. The difference between America and China, the type of society where dissent is stifled by tanks, is paper thin—the thickness of the paper that holds these words:
Those are forty-five of the
most powerful words ever strung together by man. Previously published in The Capsule. |
