*raises a hand*

The Wrong Kind of Censorship

As you've no doubt heard, the Supreme Court has just upheld the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, better known as McCain-Feingold. It regulates to whom, how, and when citizens - acting in concert or alone - can express their political opinions. The details have been hashed out a zillion times. But the gist is: Groups like the National Rifle Association, the Sierra Club, the ACLU, and the NAACP will have a much more difficult time expressing their political views or criticizing politicians during an election season.

[...]

...political speech is what the First Amendment is about. The artistic types who think the first amendment protects every taxpayer-financed bit of sacrilege on every public museum's wall, may have every right to be angry about government censorship of art, but art wasn't what the First Amendment was primarily designed to protect. The First Amendment was first and foremost designed to protect the expression of overtly political speech, of criticism of the government and elected officials.

But for some unfathomable reason, we've turned this logic on its head in this country. Today, highly educated people hurl their salad forks in rage over the "censoring" of a performance artist when she doesn't get free money from the government. But they nod approvingly when the federal government tells the ACLU it can't say what it pleases, when it pleases, about George Bush. We used to protect core rights by protecting peripheral rights. We'd say, "Sure, you have the right to smear your naked body with chocolate in the middle of Main Street," because we figured, so long as that sort of asininity is protected, our most vital freedoms will surely be secured. But now our freedoms are rotting from the inside out. As Justice Scalia noted in his dissent, the court in the last four years alone has protected such "speech" as kiddy and cable porn, but it now finds direct criticism of politicians during an election to be deserving of regulation.

Bravo.

I'll ignore the glaring contradiction I see in Jonah Goldberg's stand that "the relevant question - which is invariably overlooked - isn't whether or not you are "for" or "against" censorship. The relevant question is, What do you want to censor? Or, how much censorship do you want?" for now. I respect him as a writer, though discussing this isn't the right time.

But he says something at the end that deserves comment:

By the way, where the hell is this much-vaunted blogosphere? If three freshman congressmen from Wisconsin hinted that they wanted to regulate the use of umlauts on the internet in honor of Leif Ericson's birthday, bloggers would be on the steps of Congress up-ending cans of gasoline on themselves in protest at such an infringement on free speech. But here we have all three branches of the government severely restricting independent speech outside of the dinosaurs of Old Media and the relative silence - minus a few noble exceptions (The Volokh conspiracy, Instapundit) - is deafening.

Roar:

The Supreme Court doesn't care about freedoms of speech and association.

That's my little super-condensed version. I'm certain there are others out there who have posted similarly. Such as:

Robert Prather - "A Sad Day For Freedom Of Speech"
Bill Hobbs - "Memo to the NRA: Blog First, Air Ads Later"
John Hawkins - "Supreme Court Upholds Political Money Law (This Is A Blow To The First Amendment)" (on his news sidebar, no actual blog post)
Stephen Green, dittoing Volokh
Robert Clayton Dean - Yeah, no posts - so cut my pay and Is money speech?

yadda yadda

Mr. Goldberg, this makes it twice I've had to correct something you've posted. Don't make me come over there...

UPDATE(7:00pm)
Adding to the list...

Hit & Run - "Free Speech Defeat"
Daily Pundit - "O'Connor Ignores the First Amendment" (yeah, it was posted during lunch, but Mr. Goldberg's mini-rant still deserves the slap anyway)
Pejman Yousefzadeh - "UGH . . ."
Rick Hasen - "McConnell v. FEC: The Big Picture"

I think you get the picture.

Misha I - "...the Supreme Whores just struck down the 1st Amendment."
Classical Values - "Whose blog is this?"
Charles Austin - "Is all of this just hyperbole or is the American experiment over?"

UPDATE{12/12/2003 2:20pm)
Thanks to Instapundit for the link. Mr. Reynolds also mentions Tom Maguire - "Jonah Goldberg Is An Idiot".

Posted by Drizzten at December 11, 2003 06:51 PM