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I have a neighbor who became a United States citizen sometime around twenty years ago. He and his family moved to the United States when he was in his teens from Lithuania not long after the fall of the Soviet Union.
They’re all great people, the whole lot of them. They are the first to offer help to anyone that needs it and they are generous almost to a fault.
One day, we were sitting on my back porch with him trying to explain the intricacies of soccer to me for about the tenth time, and a thought suddenly hit him like a bolt of lightning.
He told me that he just realized that the great thing about the United States is that we can have this conversation without having to worry about going to jail.
It seemed like such a puzzling thing for him to mention this when it came to a conversation about the rules of soccer, but he explained it like this.
In countries that don’t have the First Amendment, the government could theoretically limit what you talked about, up to and including discussion in public spaces of the rules of soccer.
He was right. In other countries, it is sort of up to the government what we can talk about. In the United States, it’s up to us what we want to talk about.
However, there are some left-wing nutjobs that pretty much want to get rid of the First Amendment and make our great nation a giant “granny’s house” where they wouldn’t allow discussion of certain topics based on the whims of who is in charge.
That’s out-and-out garbage, but recently a left-leaning analyst named Barbara McQuade claimed that the First Amendment outright makes us vulnerable and makes it difficult for the government to regulate speech without being told that they are censoring people.
Well gee, that’s kinda the point of the First Amendment, isn’t it? To allow people to say things that the folks in charge might disagree with?
I mean, this country was founded on the premise that we disagreed with who was in charge.
MSNBC’s Barbara McQuade: “Our First Amendment … makes us vulnerable to claims that anything we try to do to regulate speech is censorship.” pic.twitter.com/MvoxGQr2yz
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 29, 2024
If we suddenly started allowing the slow dismantling of our freedom of speech; then talking about the rules of soccer in a public place like me and my neighbor will be the least of our worries.
Sure, it’s probably not a good idea to yell fire in a crowded theater. That being said, wanting to call everything you disagree with censorship goes totally against everything our nation was founded on.
