Freedom of Speech No Big Deal to the Left

I suppose this story I found at Slate.com via Questions and Observations shouldn’t shock me, but it does. Even though we know that the Left and statist on the Right have little regard for our constitution and the Bill of Rights, I still find it alarming that someone would publicly advocate putting restrictions on our “freedom of speech”. Yet that is exactly what Slate columnist, Eric Posner has done. He bemoans the defense of our First Amendment by President Obama in his recent address before the United Nations General Assembly.

 President Obama said so himself in a speech at the United Nations today, which included both a strong defense of the First Amendment and (“in the alternative,” as lawyers say) and a plea that the United States is helpless anyway when it comes to controlling information. In a world linked by YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, countless videos attacking people’s religions, produced by provocateurs, rabble-rousers, and lunatics, will spread to every corner of the world, as fast as the Internet can blast them, and beyond the power of governments to stop them. Muslims need to grow a thick skin, the thinking goes, as believers in the West have done over the centuries. Perhaps they will even learn what it means to live in a free society, and adopt something like the First Amendment in their own countries.

Then Posner goes on to suggest that there is an alternative.

But there is another possible response. This is that Americans need to learn that the rest of the world—and not just Muslims—see no sense in the First Amendment. Even other Western nations take a more circumspect position on freedom of expression than we do, realizing that often free speech must yield to other values and the need for order. Our own history suggests that they might have a point.

Despite its 18^th-century constitutional provenance, the First Amendment did not play a significant role in U.S. law until the second half of the 20th century. The First Amendment did not protect anarchists, socialists, Communists, pacifists, and various other dissenters when the U.S. government cracked down on them, as it regularly did during times of war and stress.

This diatribe was, of course precipitated by the recent Muslim attacks on our embassies in Egypt and Libya resulting in the deaths of four Embassy officials including our Ambassador to Libya. Despite the evidence that this was really a terrorist attack, most like by elements of al Qaeda, this moron as well as many more want the world to believe that these rioting savages were doing so because someone from America dared to impune their prophet. Mr. Posner purposely ignores that these attacks planned in detail. The leaders behind these attacks planned them to coincide with eleventh anniversary of the 2001 9/11 attacks by terrorist here in America that cost around three thousand lives.. These same leaders spent time search the media and the internet looking for something they could use as an excuse to rally their ignorant followers. They most likely found several possibilities and in the end chose this YouTube video as their tool.

None of that is important to people like Mr. Posner. What people like him want is to codify into law their principles of political correctness. They will only be happy when it becomes a criminal offense to offend people of color or some women or Islamic radicals. In the case of Islamist, offending them might logically lead to charges of inciting a riot in some nowhere rat infested desert or maybe even an accessory to murder.

In my opinion, Posner and people like him do not deserve to call themselves Americans. They have zero appreciation for the fact that our country was built on the principle of maximizing our liberties, our freedoms, and that includes the freedom of speech. Americans should never be told they should lower their standards in order to conform with the views of the rest of the world.

Well, now you know what I’m thinking. What are your thoughts?