Oh, and I should have pointed out that, so far as religion goes, the constituional protection is not beleif, but exercise. Congress shall make no law abridging the free exercise of religion, so a law resticting religious speech, as well as being problematic from a freedom of speech point of view, is problematic from a freedom of exercise of religion point of view.
you can “believe” whatever you want. You just don’t have the absolute freedom to act on those beliefs. Actions will always be regulated. Proselytizing is an action. Sure you can disguise it as a “belief” but it’s like Mormon polygamy. Just because you believe you’re supposed to do it doesn’t mean you can.
It’s not THAT arbitrary. Arbitrary suggests there is no valid reason for the decision, while one can find logical reasons to prohibit each of the examples Kalt gave:
What you’re proposing (a ban on proselytizing) is, unlike the above examples, pretty damn arbitrary. If you want your local government to restrict intrusive soliciting (which would catch aggresive panhandlers and telemarketers as well as door-to-door proselytizers), good luck. You’ll have a better chance at getting a general rule passed than some vague complaint about Jesus freaks. Besides, what constitutes proselytizing? If door-to-door Moonies count, but some coworker saying “I think Jesus was a cool guy” doesn’t, where are you drawing your line, except at some arbitrary point? Are you trying to ban irritating people, or just irritating religious people, and on what basis?
I’m a stone-cold atheist myself, and look forward to the day when secular ethics replace dogma, but in the meantime I prefer that the state and religion adopt a mutual hands-off position so I have to disagree with you and Kalt on your fairly arbitrary objections to proselytizing.
Actually, they are very, very different. Not all that the government is prohibited from banning is allowed. Private actors may forbid you to say or express a whole mess of things that the government is prohibited from banning. An example is the “don’t be a jerk” rule on these boards.
Kalt is leading you down the primrose path. Kalt’s assertion that freedom of speech is more the exception than the rule is utterly false. 99.9999999999999999% of what is expressed in this country is protected by the First Amendment. Freedom of speech is the rule.
Sua
Get this clear; this is not about belief. This is about (a) freedom of speech, and (b) freedom of exercise of religion, both of which enjoy constitutional protection. Correct, they are not absolute freedoms; both speech and the exercise of religion can be restricted, but each restriction must be justified, and proportionate to the justification. I’m not seeing any justification advanced here, except (i) what the proselyisers are saying is wrong, or (ii) proselytising annoys me, neither of which is going to stand up as a constitutionally acceptable justification.
It’s a tougher standard than that; a hypothetical prohibition on proselytizing must be narrowly tailored and serve a compelling state interest.
What’s the state interest in prohibiting proselytizing? How is it compelling?
And how do you narrowly draw the regulation, so that only the (hypothetically) compelling state interest is served?
This is one of the more ludicrous discussions I’ve seen in GD. Kalt’s position is “some forms of speech are not protected, so we can ban proselytizing.” Kalt, yes, some forms of speech are not protected. But those unprotected forms are not randomly chosen; they are the ones that pass the test above - there is a compelling state interest in prohibiting that form of speech, and the prohibition is so narrow that only the speech that infringes that compelling interest is prohibited.
That’s the rule, baby. Either make an argument that a prohibition on proselytizing meets that standard, or drop this really, really stupid idea.
Sua
I’m questioning how “freedom to exercise religion” got tied in with “freedom to proselytize”; I don’t get that without the one you don’t have the other. Why couldn’t the clause about religion reasonably be interpreted to mean “you can believe whatever you want to”?
This is a freedom of speech issue, and we have restrictions on speech. No speeches on public property without permits, no begging for money, etc. Why is it reasonable for the government to be able to say that I can have an anti-war rally but only with a permit for a specific time and place, but not to make me specify on a form where I want to have an anti-Satan rally? Seems pretty arbitrary to me.
What planet are you from? To hold any rally on public property, whether it be anti-Satan or anti-war, or even anti-willful refusal to understand the basic concepts of freedom of speech and religion, you must get a permit. What makes you think that a religious group can simply take over Main Street if they wanted to to hold a rally?
To walk up to someone on the street and talk to them about any topic, be it whether the Yankees should have signed Giambi, or the results of the election, or even why you think your god is peachy keen, you do not need a permit.
To ring someone’s doorbell and talk to the person who answers, whether it be to praise the glories of Greenpeace, or to condemn welfare reform, or to say that it was really cool that some guy got nailed to a tree a couple thousand years ago, you do not need a permit.
Give me a reason that Greenpeace should have more protection than the Methodists, and maybe we have a debate here. You haven’t given that reason. Instead, you pretend that the limitations on freedom of speech and religious expression are arbitrary, so we can just add this one.
The limitations are not arbitrary. They follow specific and well-defined rules. A ban on prosylezation does not fit within those rules, so it cannot be banned.
Sua
That’s even more egregious than my spelling, Sua.
How 'bout this, then: person A bangs on my door and informs me that my house is on fire. When I rush out of the house in my skidmarked BVDs in November, it is discovered that my house was never on fire and he was having a laugh at my expense, I could probably have him arrested on some kind of public safety rap or at least get a restraining order forbidding him to bang on my door. Yes?
But if person B yammers on about my soul spending eternity in flames, I can’t do anything because that’s free speech and protected by the law of the land.
In both cases, he’s informing me that I’m in imminent danger of combustion, in neither case does he have truth as a defense, and yet in one case he’s at the least creating a nuisance and in the other he’s not. How’s that?
On legal matters, as is his habit, Sua Sponte has it nailed down.
In more general terms, annoying people have a right to express themselves, too. We have the right to tell them, politely but firmly, “I’d rather not listen to you, so please leave me alone”.
What are you yammering about? Of course you can do something. You can walk away if you’re in a public place, and you can close the door if you’re in your house.
Do you really need a government law to take care of situations like this? What are you, some kind of hothouse orchid?
Several years ago, Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on my Father’s door. He invited them in for a LONG discussion. After confounding them with all his atheist minded questions about creationism, heaven and hell, the JWs prohibition of blood transfussions, their belief that celebrating holidays are bad, etc… they finally gave up. One of them muttered “You just don’t understand” before they walked off, undoubtedly demoralized.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses have never returned.
The best way to fight “bad” speech is with more speech.
You know, I really agree with that. Honest. It’s just that these self-righteous nitwits who think they have some legal right to occupy my precious time with this horseshit actually DO have that legal right, which makes me over-react. Guess this one was really intended for the Pit.
What do you do when you firmly disagree with your own principles?
Re-examine them?
I think (as in, my humble opinion) that religions should spread by example (if they’re to spread at all), not by advertisement or - even worse - by the metaphorical sword. Allowing religions which believe in proselytizing to run amok causes nothing but trouble. The state has a compelling interest in stopping the spread of such factions. Having a national opt-in list for people who don’t mind being proselytized to in narrowly tailored to meet that compelling state interest.
Couple of points:
I’m not at all convinced that you could get the fire alarm guy arrested on some kind of “public safety rap”. You might get a restraining order if he was doing this persistently, I suppose, but if a succession of different people were playing practical jokes of this kind you’d have a problem.
More to the point, your statement that “in neither case does he have truth as a defense” points out the difference between the two situations. In the case of the fire alarm guy, it is demonstrable that what he is saying is untrue, and that he knows that it is untrue. In the case of the annoyingly persistent evangelist, it is not demonstrable that what he is saying is untrue (or, at least, you will not get general agreement that it is demonstrable) and you certainly cannot say that he knows it is untrue - he almost certainly believes that it is true. In legal terms, you can accuse the fire alarm guy of malice, but not the annoying evangelist.
In the case of people who raise false fire alarms it is foreseeable that the victims of his joke will take some action which might be injurious to yourself or others - they call the fire brigade, they turn on the sprinkler system, they panic and there is a crush, whatever - before they have a chance to test the truth of what he is saying for themselves. I don’t think evangelism presents quite the same dangers.
Remember, as Sua has said, you have to find a compelling state interest here. What is the compelling state interest in prohibiting proselytisation? There is no avoiding this question.
Let’s broaden this out a little, since I agree with Kalt that the definition of “compelling state interest” could be flexible enough to apply here: telemarketers have the ability (and the interest) to make every hour of the day and night an unending hell for anyone who owns a telephone, right? If the number of telemarketing calls increases by a factor of, say, four, don’t you think the legal protection (such as it is) that telemarketing enjoys legally could be revisited? Or spam e-mail: protected by free speech, I think that if our ability to use e-mail becomes so severely impaired by waking up every morning to find literally thousands of crap messages clogging our computers, and checking your messages and deleting the crap takes hours for everyone, won’t the laws allowing (I know, I’m using that word again) such free speech be re-interpreted, using the pubic good as a standard?
Well, as people grow more enlightened (not that I’m sure any such thing is happening) and door-to-door and on-the-street convertors are adopting some of the same mass-marketing techniques (yammer at a few million people, you’ll get two or three that see your point), won’t the courts eventually re-interpret the archaic belief that the virtues of proseletyzing outweigh the interests of 99.99999 % of the people they yammer at?
I suppose I’m not making a legal argument anymore (“Like you ever were, ppr…”–all together now) but asking what the use is of acquiring knowledge (or fighting ignorance) if we insist on retaining the same definition of “ignorance” over the centuries? The Constitution was written at a time when people had far fewer objective tools to understand the universe by: as we evolve into a more secular, relativistic, multi-cultural, tolerant society, must we keep the lines in place, in EXACTLY the same place, that they were drawn hundreds of years ago? I think not. If an evangelist bugged you 200 years ago, you could say, “You don’t KNOW that he’s wrong, do you?” with more self-assurance than you can today, and with less assurance than you will two hundred years from now. Don’t you think the law will be reinterpreted to reflect that growing dimunition of religion? If so, why not get started now?
Why couldn’t I argue that the evangelist at my door is trying to terrify me, in the same exact way that the fire alarm guy is, about my imminent combustion, that his goal is not to make me run out of my house, but to give my time and money and energy and every waking thought to Jesus, which is probably more destructive in the long run than the harm I’d get from running out of my house in my underwear in November. In other words, whether he believes his line of horseshit or not, he is warning me that I need to radically change my life right now or else suffer terribly in ways that IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM TO KNOW ARE TRUE. The fire alarm guy couldn’t defend himself in court by claiming that an angel of the Lord came down and whispered that I had some phlogistron in my closet that was going to ignite, could he? Why is the evangelist allowed to use what is, essentially, that same defense?
Again, I don’t think your analogy holds up. Telemarketers and spammers are defined by the communication medium they use; evangelists aren’t. Yes, if unsolicited phone calls or unsolicited e-mails become voluminous enough to become a serious problem, and in particular if they impede other uses of these communications media, there is probably a compelling state interest which would justify restriction or limitation. But the restriction could not be content-based – and rightly so, in my view. So you could restrict (say) unsolicited phone calls, and this would catch telemarketing evangelists, but you couldn’t restrict unsolicited phone calls from evangelists while attaching no restrictions to unsolicited phone calls from charities, political campaigns and double-glazing salesmen.
“. . . as people grow more enlightened . . . The Constitution was written at a time when people had far fewer objective tools to understand the universe by: as we evolve into a more secular, relativistic, multi-cultural, tolerant society, must we keep the lines in place, in EXACTLY the same place, that they were drawn hundreds of years ago? I think not. If an evangelist bugged you 200 years ago, you could say, “You don’t KNOW that he’s wrong, do you?” with more self-assurance than you can today”
Language like this betrays the fundamental weakness of your position, I suggest. Your basic problem with the evangelists is that you think that what they say is, quite simply, objectively wrong. You assume or imply that this justifies us in restricting their freedom of speech.
But whether they are right or wrong is not the issue. Their freedom to speak, like everybody elses, does not depend on the correctness or validity of their opinions., or on what is, either popularly or officially, perceived to be correct, valid or true. Can’t you see that this is an absolutely vital principle, and that what you are proposing crosses a major line here?
And to respond to your continued yammering . . .
No, there are material differences. The fire alarm guy knows that what he is saying is false; the evangelist does not. (The most you can say is that he does not know that it is true, which is not the same thing at all.)
Also what the fire alarm guy is saying requires you to take immediate, urgent action which will foreseeably have immediate, profound physical and financial effects on you and others. A call to repentance and conversion, however strongly and colourfully worded, is simply not the same in terms of its foreseeable immediate effects.
Finally, the fire alarm guy is trying to bring about consequences which he knows and believes will be harmful to you and others, and his only justification is his own amusement (or, possibly, a hatred of you). You cannot say the same of the evangelist.
A better analogy, surely, is the guy who calls to the door to ask you to join/donate to the Republican/Democratic/Libertarian party, or a charitable organisation, or a cultural organisation. Like the evangelist, he is urging certain values and ethical standards on you which you may not share, and which you may in fact oppose, and he is asking you to act on them. Can you disntinguish between these people and the evangelist (other than by reference to the correctness of what they say, or the fact that it annoys you) or would you support restricting them all?
You could argue that there is a compelling state interest in ensuring that citizens can have the quiet enjoyment of their own homes, and therefore restrict unsolicited phone calls and unsolicited calls to the door. (For all I know some localities have done this.) But I find it hard to draw an acceptable line between the evangelist and the others I have mentioned.