Quote# 86520
Jonathan Turley opines that as free speech recedes, silence follows in its wake.
Certainly this is an important point given the incessant effort by liberals to silence those — such as Bill O'Reilly, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh — who are not accepting of their worldview.
Similarly, redistribution of speech would allow the government to restrict speech that it deems harmful. Therefore, if the will of millions of voters were tossed aside by an activist judge, the government could prevent outraged voters from airing their discontent on talk radio by perversely asserting that these unhappy voters were fomenting hatred.
How would our Founding Fathers have felt about those who seek to silence conservatives or anyone else with whom one disagrees? To liberals, the 1st Amendment is just something else that needs to be silenced.
Edward Murphy,
LA Times 10 Comments [3/20/2012 3:19:59 AM]
Fundie Index: 10
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#1384207
How would our Founding Fathers have felt about those who seek to silence conservatives or anyone else with whom one disagrees?
I dunno... they might pass Alien and Sedition Acts... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts
3/20/2012 4:28:04 AM
#1384211
Oops! Double post!
3/20/2012 4:32:10 AM
#1384232
Bollox
All I saw there was a lot of buzzwords.
3/20/2012 5:24:05 AM
#1384283
Doubting Thomas
Nobody's trying to silence Rush Limbaugh... he's doing a good enough job of that on his own. He had, what, 140 advertisers pull their advertising?
3/20/2012 6:39:01 AM
#1384286
Brendan Rizzo
Conservatives have made far more attempts to silence their political opponents than liberals. Bearing in mind that American liberals are more centrist than their foreign counterparts, who have done nothing of the sort either, and you're just paranoid, Mr. Murphy.
3/20/2012 6:45:14 AM
#1384350
aaa
Whiny bullshit about how judicial branch shoots down really dumb laws, part 4356. Please, get some originality on this shit.
3/20/2012 9:09:33 AM
#1384424
Mech610
How do you redistribute speech?
3/20/2012 1:17:54 PM
#1384752
Tempus
You're still free to say anything you want, as long as it doesn't involve direct threats against other people. No one is trying to *silence* Rush. He's still free to say anything he wants, anything at all.
But then again, you already knew that.
Limbaugh is free to continue talking. No one is stopping him. Just like no one is stopping the stations that carry his show from dropping him like a hot potato, or advertisers like Carbonite from dumping him, because that is also their legal right. Isn't that what "voting with your dollars" means? And if they all dump him--since Bryan Fischer is still talking, I don't think he's got much to worry about there--then Rush is STILL free to continue pumping forth as much insanely bigoted, pig-ignorant, misogynistic shit as he wants.
3/21/2012 12:13:50 PM
#1385070
Reynardine
Hate to tell you this, Bucko, but back in the Founding Fathers' days, people who talked like your heroes often faced the ducking stool before the Eighth Amendment was passed. After that, private horsewhippings were just kind of overlooked.
3/22/2012 11:19:28 AM
#1385318
If the Founding Fathers had had any idea of how Limbaugh, O'Reilly and other conservatives would one day twist and misquote them, I'm sure they'd have had quite a bit to say about it, but I don't think you'd like any of it.
3/23/2012 6:18:59 AM
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