{"id":952,"date":"2015-05-08T17:51:45","date_gmt":"2015-05-08T22:51:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=952"},"modified":"2015-05-08T17:51:45","modified_gmt":"2015-05-08T22:51:45","slug":"just-dont-exercise-that-right-pardner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2015\/05\/08\/just-dont-exercise-that-right-pardner\/","title":{"rendered":"Just don’t exercise that Right, Pardner"},"content":{"rendered":"

One Pissed Off Liberal<\/a> over at The Daily Kos suggests that not all rights should be exercised<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Sure, it’s your right to say whatever you want no matter how stupid or hateful, but is it a good idea? Are you doing yourself or society any favors? It’s your perfect right to be an idiot but your idiocy, once loosed upon the general public, is another matter. You don’t have the moral right to make other people suffer because you’re<\/strong> stupid. Sometimes life is about more than what you have a right to do, but what you should or shouldn’t do within the context of civilized society \u2013 which I submit, we should be aiming for. Civilization seems a worthy goal at this point. …<\/p>\n

Two people are dead and one wounded because a bunch of dumbass macho yahoos down in Texas (who could have been so much more) thought it’d be cute to have a ‘draw the prophet’ contest…to prove they weren’t afraid of Sharia law and shit.<\/p>\n

‘Hoo boy! Look at us! We ain’t afraid of no durned Muslims and we ain’t ashamed of being dumber than fucking dirt. It’s our RIGHT!’<\/p>\n

Hateful, ignorant and proud of it, what could be more American than that?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mrph.\u00a0 Suggesting that they – that is, the American Freedom Defense Initiative<\/a> – should not exercise their Constitutional Rights because it might offend someone strikes me as toleration gone too far<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Consider: the various religious sects existing within the USA are expected to tolerate each other and to concede to the government supremacy in the law of the land, just as the government does not meddle in theology.\u00a0 As part of this and other concerns about government, we concede full speech rights to one and all, with minor restrictions.\u00a0 We do NOT suggest that folks be reasonable and not exercise some right, because reasonableness is not necessarily an objective term, but a subjective<\/em> term.<\/p>\n

For example, to me, it’s sweet reasonableness that there is no evidence for a God and we should live by a secular moral code that explores rationality, rather than mystical spirituality.\u00a0 In full analogy mode, I should then propose that all Bibles be burned because they offend me.\u00a0 (Actually, they don’t, but that’s another discussion.)\u00a0 Should I expect cooperation?<\/p>\n

Of course not.\u00a0 Reasonableness depends on your frame of reference.<\/p>\n

The importance of this incident is not that a bunch of folks who may be Islamophobes decided to bait the Muslims.\u00a0 It’s not that a couple of Muslims lost their temper and rose to the bait.\u00a0 The importance of this incident is to clarify the primacy<\/strong> of free expression – not reasonably free expression.\u00a0 It’s important that liberals, conservatives, Christians, Muslims, Zoroastrians – and agnostics – all understand that.<\/p>\n

And about those minor restrictions?\u00a0 The eponymous attorney & UCLA professor at the Volokh Conspiracy checks in on hate speech and the First Amendment<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I keep hearing about a supposed \u201chate speech\u201d exception to the First Amendment, or statements such as, \u201cThis isn\u2019t free speech, it\u2019s hate speech,\u201d or \u201cWhen does free speech stop and hate speech begin?\u201d But there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the First Amendment as other ideas. One is as free to condemn Islam \u2014 or Muslims, or Jews, or blacks, or whites, or illegal aliens, or native-born citizens \u2014 as one is to condemn capitalism or Socialism or Democrats or Republicans.<\/p>\n

To be sure, there are some kinds of speech that are unprotected by the First Amendment. But those narrow exceptions have nothing to do with \u201chate speech\u201d in any conventionally used sense of the term. For instance, there is an exception for \u201cfighting words\u201d \u2014 face-to-face personal insults addressed to a specific person, of the sort that are likely to start an immediate fight. But this exception isn\u2019t limited to racial or religious insults, nor does it cover all racially or religiously offensive statements. Indeed, when the City of St. Paul tried to specifically punish bigoted fighting words, the Supreme Court held that this selective prohibition was unconstitutional (R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul<\/i> (1992)), even though a broad ban on all fighting words would indeed be permissible. (And, notwithstanding CNN anchor Chris Cuomo\u2019s Tweet<\/a> that \u201chate speech is excluded from protection,\u201d and his later claims that by \u201chate speech\u201d he means \u201cfighting words,\u201d the fighting words exception is not generally labeled a \u201chate speech\u201d exception, and isn\u2019t coextensive with any established definition of \u201chate speech\u201d that I know of.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In another post<\/a>, he states:<\/p>\n

\u201cIncitement,\u201d of course, isn\u2019t just a lay term (like offensiveness or blasphemy) \u2014 it\u2019s well-known as the name of a First Amendment exception, a category of speech that can be restricted. What\u2019s less well-known is the precise definition of incitement: advocacy intended to, and likely to, persuade people to engage in imminent illegal conduct. \u201cImminent\u201d here means that the speaker is trying to persuade people to act in the coming hours (think the classic example of someone speaking to a mob assembled in front of a particular building), not at some time in the indefinite future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One Pissed Off Liberal over at The Daily Kos suggests that not all rights should be exercised: Sure, it’s your right to say whatever you want no matter how stupid or hateful, but is it a good idea? Are you doing yourself or society any favors? It’s your perfect right \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=952"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":954,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952\/revisions\/954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}