What about some conservatives wanting to ban pornography, or ban public displays they consider blasphemous?
Cranks on both side want to ban certain kinds of speech. Most people don’t want to restrict free speech – even those campus protests aren’t against free speech, they’re part of free speech. Students are free to say “I don’t like this speaker and I don’t think he should be welcome here”, or anything else. If they are advocating for laws banning those speakers, then that’s different – but saying “I don’t like what you have to say and I don’t think you should say it” is not anti-free speech in any way whatsoever.
Any liberal policy that works will, with time, become a conservative policy. Some things should be changed: It is the liberal’s role to change them. Some things should be kept the same: It is the conservative’s role to keep them.
Note that this does not have much relation to the current state of American politics, which unfortunately lacks a conservative party.
What do you think about, for example, snatching a microphone away from a speaker, or blowing whistles and yelling through a bullhorn over the top of a presenter so that no one can hear what he says? Do you consider both of those exercises in free speech? What about blocking the entrances to a building before a scheduled event to prevent those who would like to hear the speaker from assembling to do so? What about pressuring a college president to disinvite an offensive presenter? It’s not a “law”, but certainly a policy decision that prevents a voice from being heard.
I consider actions designed to prevent someone else from hearing / being heard to be in contrary to the spirit of the First Amendment. Many of the latest campus protests seem to fall under this heading.
I think “privatization” of the VA is good idea. It makes way more sense for the VA to pay for veterans to go to the same doctors and hospitals as everybody else than it does for them to try to maintain their own separate facilities.
The problem is that anyone who is really good at his or her job in a VA facility, from nurses to doctors to administrators, can probably make a lot more money elsewhere. That’s especially true with administrators, where the salary difference can be pretty substantial. This means that anyone left who is any good gets pulled up the chain quickly, a clear instance of the Peter Principle in action (that is, everyone gets promoted to their level of incompetence).
Fixing those pay gaps is probably impossible and probably wouldn’t fix the problem entirely anyway. So there’s no good way for the VA not to have second-class facilities that are administrative train wrecks.
They should maintain their counselors and social workers, and the details of how their benefits would work would be up in the air, but overall I think they’d probably serve veterans better if they didn’t have to focus on maintaining duplicated medical services.
Some of them probably do, just as those on the right who have committed vandalism against material and displays they consider pornographic or blasphemous also oppose the first amendment for some things. But these are fringes of each side – in general, liberals poll higher (but still low) on support of banning hate speech, and conservatives poll higher (but still low) on support for banning obscenity and blasphemy.
Cite for “conservatives poll higher (but still low) on support for banning obscenity and blasphemy”? I’ve never read a poll on that, but it sounds like an interesting read.
No one seems to have mentioned Citizens United in this thread. Democrats seem to generally support the idea of banning at least some political speech by associations of individuals.
Here’s another one – doesn’t break down between liberals and conservatives, but more people in the US support restricting sexually explicit speech than racist and bigoted speech… and I doubt the ones who want to ban obscene speech tend to be liberal.
Attempting to “normalize” at least certain types of pedophilia (largely through abolition or significant lowering of age of consent laws) as part of the Sexual Revolution (as documented here) has more or less failed, and in a historical reversal, many liberals and progressives have become as stern as conservatives in denouncing pedophilia albeit more on grounds of social justice.
It’s clear that most gun control measures proposed by American liberals in the past generation or so have failed to actually reduce deaths from gun violence and are moreover unconstitutional given any reasonable reading of the Second Amendment.
I urge you to read this excellent article (by a leftist no less). For the record, I’m not saying all gun control measures are doomed to fail-something like repealing the Second Amendment and conducting a great “gun hunt” that would seize most of the firearms in this country probably would put a dent in gun-related violence but good luck with passing that.
None of this addresses the thread topic. It’s pretty much the opposite, trying to show how liberal policies were bad, when the topic is conservative policies which were good.
The first one is also a fabrication by the alt-right, and I really wish you’d stop hanging out with them. You’re a smart kid, and you don’t need to be pulled that way.