Dude, that was supposed to be a secret. And they aren’t dead, exactly, most of the time.
:rolleyes:
The Drudge Headline strikes again (ignorance fighting to take longer than we thought).
Drudge’s headline boldly claims “COLUMBIA DEAN: WE’D INVITE HITLER TO SPEAK.”
The actual context and intent behind is strikingly different. Dean Coatsworth notes that if Hitler wanted a platform in the US, he’d have plenty of platforms to do so. He pauses, however, to state that if he were willing to engage in a debate and a discussion, and be challenged by Columbia students and faculty, he would be invited.
Taking a cue from Drudge is like citing Wiki… sometimes he’s correct, sometimes he’s a cheap partisan hack (Drudge, not Ivylass).
These statements are incorrect. The Fourteenth Amendment precludes the states from depriving any person of life, liberty or property without due process. First Amendment freedoms are considered an incorporated part of the concept of “liberty” as it is construed for this amendment. And the First Amendment does not define the rights of American citizens, but, rather, people who are in America.
Now, if the Supreme Court had hung the incorporation doctrine on the “privileges or immunities” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, then the result would be different.
I don’t think everyone agrees that the Columbia decision is a good one. I don’t, but it does bring up an interesting point, considering the follow-on remark the dean made: does everyone sufficiently notorious deserve a chance to speak? I don’t know the answer to that.
I don’t agree with the kids in Louisiana, either. There was argument about whose tree/spot/area/whatever that belonged to, and it got way out of hand. The school principal, if he had an ounce of sense, would have lowered the boom. Instead, he tried to pass it off as a joke. Everybody blew his or her cool, including some kids who had demonstrably violent tempers and run-ins with the law already. It was a bad situation made worse because people wouldn’t stand up for what’s right, moral, and decent. The African-Americans were victims, here, to be sure, but to me that doesn’t excuse extreme violence. I see some people here being honestly upset, and a lot more politicians trying to make political gains. They are by far the worst offenders, because they really don’t care about anyone except themselves.
What is free speech in the US? To quote:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Interpreting that has taken up the time of the Congress, SCOTUS, and just about everyone else since the moment the amendment was passed. There’s the question of why the amendment went in to begin with, what it was supposed to do, what we want it to mean, and so forth. You could write a book about it, and many people have already done that.
Wikipedia does a good job of covering this in detail, and includes legal precedents.
OK, so having said this, I’ll repeat the quote (Hughes?) who said “Freedom of speech does not permit you to yell “fire” in a crowded theater.”
In short, free speech isn’t some Biblical commandment to let anyone say anything! If I had been the Louisiana school principal, I would have immediately made a statement condemning the nooses and stating unequivocally that it was wrong and hateful. I also would have suspended any students I found were involved in it, and made it clear that such behavior was not tolerated. If later on, the courts had decided I had “abridged” someone’s rights, so be it, but I would have set a tone of fairness and “rightness”. I don’t know that I would have anticipated retaliation, but I would have also reacted harshly to any attempts at it.
It may be unfair that the law charges assault more harshly than “hate speech”, but either Gandhi was right or humanity is doomed.
If I were at Columbia right now, I’d tell the university I was transferring. We already know that Ahmadinejad is a kook who is viewed with distaste even by some people in his own country; does Columbia have to give him more air time? Do they really think that debate (or anything else) is going to change his mind? He’s yet another politician who has discovered that hatred and close-mindedness are powerful ways to get people to do whatever you want them to do. My advice to Columbia is to stop fighting fires by pouring gasoline on them.
Broadly speaking, free speech allows people to say they hate something. But it can prohibit them from encouraging people to act on that hatred in an illegal manner. So Ahmadinejad can publically declare that he hates America, George Bush, Jesus Christ, and motherhood is he wants to. And if he tells his audience they should write petitions, and organize parades, and go on strike in order to have all the things he hates made illegal, he’s still okay. But if he tells people to throw a rock through a window, he’s advocating an illegal act. And if he holds up a rock and tells his audience “You know what to do!” then it’s reasonable to surmise he’s advocating an illegal act even though he did not explicitly say so.
I’m not sure that I agree with that. The Supreme Court has carved out other types of speech that are not protected besides the two you mention. Those would include obscenity, sedition, and defamation. And I’m not sure why you say that those are not first amendment issues.
One of my favorite quotes on the topic reads thusly:
Appellate Court - Texas v. Flynt
That strikes me as a little bit Orwellian–calling someone out for trying hard not to find a crime. If an act is not obviously criminal, then it should be hard to find a crime.
Well, it wasn’t hard for the very same DA to decide that beating someone up was “attempted homicide”, despite the fact that there was no evidence of such an attempt, when the suspects were black. That’s the whole point to the situation: when the suspects were white, there was no attempt to stretch the law, when they were black, the law was stretched to a breaking point.
As for what I said, I do believe that a District Attorney has an obligation to society to use the statutes passed to deal with situations as they crop up which society knows it needs to control. I did preface my commentary by noting I’m no expert on Louisiana Criminal law. Maybe Louisiana has no hate crime statutes that could be interpreted to cover the situation of the nooses. But I doubt that. Now, if the DA says, “Here are the hate crime statutes I have available, and here is why I cannot in good conscience as a DA charge these individuals with violation of any of them: …” that would be one thing. But to simply offer the statement that he could find no applicable law under which they could be charged gives a significantly different impression.
DSYoung makes several very good points. I would like to add to that by citing the recent SCOTUS decision in Virginia v Black , which I believe has some bearing here. The court ruled that states could make it a crime to burn crosses if the defendant’s intent was to intimidate or inspire fear of bodily harm. Thus, speech that is not a direct incitement to violence but rather a general threat of violence is not protected.
The state of Lousiana has a specific law against cross burning , and a more general law against terrorizing . The latter states:
Whether this applies directly to the Jena case is probably a matter for GD.