Free Speech Is Not Absolutely Free

http://thecollegeconservative.com/2012/06/01/free-speech-includes-all-speech/

The right to freedom of speech is one of the most fundamental of values in America, spreading across the world. But people commonly misinterpret what it means, suggesting it is limitless by the ad nauseum claim that “it’s a free country”; this is also applied to freedom of actions, which is more easily refuted on basic ethical grounds, let alone legal ones. Free speech has long been established to have limits based in obscenity, fighting words, defamation of character and incitement to crimes. The most used example of incitement is yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, while libel is misrepresenting someone’s actions in published works and claiming it is factual. Obscenity is more difficult to discern, but the limitation could be construed to restrict more public sale or broadcast of such things. That’s how pornography is protected in its existence, privatized in its funding. But there have been many instances where preachers, especially recently, that have used their status as a religious official to speak words against homosexuality that go beyond simply saying they’ll go to hell or even wishing they’d die of AIDS or the like. Those are within rights, even if they are repugnant statements. The fact that they speak about religious concepts and in generalities (not individual gays, but the gay community) respectively makes them not fall under defamation of character or the like. But when you say that the government should kill homosexuals or that we should isolate gay females and males on an island and separate them by sex with electrified fences until they die off, you’ve gone beyond what even your state as a person associated with a house of worship, free of taxation, permits you to. This is especially so if you start saying what you think the government should do or even what you know it won’t do, but ought to in your opinion. But even when you just say it as your personal opinion without regard to the government, it borders on incitement to illegal actions, on the level of Japanese internment camps from World War 2 in America, not to mention the obvious Holocaust in that same era. No one’s saying you have to hold positive opinions about homosexuals; you can hate them all you want. But there are limits to what we can say for the same reason there are limits on many other freedoms, which I spoke about briefly in other articles, such as “Pro Choice Or Pro Liberty”. One shouldn’t try to legally protect otherwise unlawful speech under the guise of religious freedom or unrealistic ideas of how free you think speech is or should be. Speech can motivate actions, so we shouldn’t let it be abused anymore than the value of religion, regardless of if one believes it to reflect truth or not.

Preachers have every right to express distaste and even moral condemnation against homosexuals, along with everything else, but just because it’s fashionable within the particular sub culture to bash gays on such a level that is explicitly genocidal, even if not so direct in the method, doesn’t mean it’s protected free speech. At the very least, it’s in poor taste even if it is protected by the basic limits of criminalizing hate speech by imminent threat instead of any threat, but when you advocate such a thing, it goes beyond speech that merely expresses hatred and goes to acting on that hatred in some way that is illegal, like putting gays in separate electrified fenced off areas until they die off. No one’s saying you can’t express even strong distaste or bigotry towards people, but when you use words to give an impression that you intend harm to someone, either in their reputation or their person, those expressions are not legally protected automatically, especially if you are taken seriously, or even if people laugh at it jeeringly, because that just means that if they had the opportunity, they may very well do it, but the present law thankfully prevents them from doing so.

Making such a controversy over what you think are overly strict legal prohibitions on particular types of speech misses the point of freedom in general. A simple way to explain why any freedom is not completely at ease to be performed in any way is the idea of balance. A taijitu, the symbol most often called a yin yang, is one way to see it. To paraphrase, there is good in evil and there is evil in good. Some things are not harmless in their existence, so forbidding them is actually protecting people, not unnecessary censorship. There are dangers to the positive liberties we enjoy in that they can be taken to excess. So benefits exist in the negation of very specific instances of speech that are nearly universally considered damaging to civil society in that they allow for more expansive borders to what is permissible. When we have basic guidelines in terms of such a widespread and diverse practice as speech in one form or another: spoken, printed, broadcast, etc, then the extent to which one can push those limits is fairly large, to the level where satire is protected on the grounds that it is not obscene for its own sake, but to make a point. The Westboro Baptist Church argued its own legal cases well in terms of their speech being protected and not strictly criminal hate speech or defamation in the immediate sense of the terms. What they do is motivated by religious beliefs first and foremost and protection of those, whether you agree with them or not, is as essential as protecting our right to expression. Since they are not doing their protests because of a primary hatred of homosexuals irrespective of religious considerations and they are not attacking the individual as they are still alive, there are basic loopholes that are in place to protect them. This is not to say that the spirit behind WBC’s slanderous remarks is a good thing, but legally they are protected on the grounds that the individual cannot sue if they are already dead and it becomes difficult to establish whether someone can sue on a person’s behalf. Does it really affect another person if their friend is insulted and already dead? Does it affect the person already dead at all? These sorts of questions muddy what are already clouded waters to begin with. But both freedom of speech and religion have their limits and even Westboro understands this. Not that they’d feel the need to actually inflict property damage or assault gay people or those that “enable” them; their God will do it for them according to their beliefs. That’s where hate crimes start, though in this case the argument would be that these are merely assaults and not hate crimes, just as their speech is not specifically derived from the homosexuality itself, but religious beliefs about homosexuality. What distinguishes hate speech from defamation of character in general is your basic motivation for why you speak the hateful and libelous words you do. If it is merely out of spite for the individual or group in general, it is defamation, but if it is because the individual or group in question possesses particular characteristics that you are biased against, then the hate speech denotation is justified. Further qualification specifies whether your threats or hateful words give a person a feeling of imminent danger. If this is the case, then the hate speech can be criminally prosecuted. I admit I’m not an expert on this sort of thing and there may be more nuances that I’m not aware of, but fundamentally the protection of any speech, including hateful forms, is limited by whether it infringes upon the fundamental rights we all share, which include a basic sense of security in our persons, freedom of speech and religion, amongst the other derivative rights thereof. As the saying goes, “Your right to punch me stops at my nose”

While speech is certainly a valuable part of our society, we shouldn’t take it for granted as something that has a catch all sentiment of being acceptable all the time in every way it can be taken. Words are not just empty of any meaning, even if the meanings we attach to them vary by time and place. They are the foundation of beliefs, which are the motivation to actions. To paraphrase Confucius, if we don’t take our words seriously and reflect that our saying something leads to how we regard ourselves and others, then we risk social disharmony. If we speak hatred of others, it suggests a sort of self loathing that is at the root of the problem. One hears the Christian notion of hating the sin and loving the sinner, but with such statements made in today’s culture regarding the supposed problem of gay people and alleged agendas, it seems like there really isn’t a fundamental solution except to go back to antiquated ideas. Looking towards the future does not mean we throw out the past entirely, but we certainly don’t bring in traditions that are repressive of those that pose no real threat to others. Gay people, among so many other minorities still mistreated today in speech and action, should not even be treated ill with words. There are legal protections to those reprehensible voices, but only to a point. You cannot say you want to kill someone without the potential threat of battery charges against you on the simple fear that you may follow through with that thought in actual form. To not take what you say seriously is to make your deeds worthless. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Catholics, Contraception and Conscience

http://thecollegeconservative.com/2012/03/07/getting-it-on/

I will preface by saying I know this isn’t solely a Catholic issue, but it has been Catholics who have made this a big issue over time. They are, from what I understand, still the single largest Christian demographic in the country, though I wonder how much of it is exaggerating statistics by considering even lapsed or apostate Catholics along with the ones who actually go to mass and confession regularly on the records? Contraception is not an issue that is opposed on ethical grounds by merely Catholics, though they do take it to a “logical” conclusion that it should not be done according to their very strict notion of what sexuality is ordained for by “God”. There are no doubt many Protestants who oppose teaching contraception use in school because it supposedly encourages promiscuity, but they have no fundamental opposition to the use of it in contexts such as marriage. Catholicism, however, has a very narrow permission for the use of birth control, specifically oral birth control, such as the use for medical reasons, like irregular periods or amenorrhea, where periods don’t come when you should be having them or dysmenorrhea, where periods cause pain that interferes with daily life.  The issue of whether insurance providers should be mandated to provide birth control is an issue that gets into whether contraception is considered basic medical care, which is an issue of insurance agents splitting hairs and thus not entirely an issue of government overstepping its bounds in terms of first amendment rights of free religious exercise so much as private entities taking too much liberty with the independence they have.

What is at issue in my mind is that one’s individual freedom of conscience should not be overridden by a group’s supposed freedom of conscience. Like public schools and prayer, individual students have the right to pray, but the school does not, especially since it constitutes government entanglement with religion. A college funded by the government in part has no real say in terms of denying coverage, but even private institutions are crossing a bit of a line in declaring that individuals who are in need of birth control for various health reasons or even just to stay safe in having intercourse cannot have it because the school opposes it on religious grounds.  It’s not as if they probably don’t have at least a partial justification for limiting insurance support for birth control through their own provider. This necessitates bringing up the free market economy of insurance coverage that can make your head spin, no doubt. You can get coverage from an insurer who will pay for your birth control under their plan and the problem is solved. As long as the school, such as a Catholic one, is not forcing people to get their healthcare insurance, then things are good. Sandra Fluke, insulted as an individual by conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, might be overstepping boundaries of individual rights by asking a school to provide birth control through their healthcare plan to everyone. It’s one thing to bring up her examples of women, some of which are Catholic, who’ve had severe reproductive health problems and could’ve solved them through birth control paid for by the school for medical reasons, but the government paying for contraception as a whole might be construed as encouraging open sex, even if it’s safe sex. The distinction between this and the school teaching contraception is that the school is in an educational context, whereas the government just paying through healthcare for safe sex is a bit more grand of a scale than telling students that they should be safe with sex when they may not know better otherwise. Grown adults should be expected to pay for birth control if they can manage it and be responsible without the support of the government. Impoverished groups might be under consideration to get coverage by the government in a similar way as people are in terms of other problems resulting from their poverty that the government can aid with in some way.

The crux of the issue still lies with the fault of people thinking a school can make declarations based on religious ideas instead of leaving that to the parents and individual students. Private educational systems can place reasonable limits upon people as they have certain individual expectations based on their school ideals, but denying coverage through their healthcare plan to all people because of a religious objection is patently absurd, on the level of denying people an abortion if it will save the woman’s life, which happened with a nun from Arizona who was excommunicated from the Church for approving of an abortion for a woman who was having partial heart failure and, if she had continued the pregnancy, would likely have died. For the Catholic Church, known for advocating a more consistent pro life position in terms of opposing the death penalty, aiding the impoverished and otherwise preserving life as much as possible overall, to oppose an abortion that would save a person’s life, admittedly at the expense of what they consider to be an innocent life, seems quite unconscionable. The principle appears consistent at first, but if some isolated incident conflicts with what are generally accepted ideas of “protecting life”, they will apparently allow two lives to be taken away by their God instead of sacrificing one to allow the quality of the other’s life to be improved and continue. The incident in the Southwest involved an 11 week old fetus, not even remotely viable outside the womb. If it had been viable, aborting it could’ve easily been decried as against the Catholic Church’s ideal of maintaining life throughout its span, but not so in this particular circumstance. It’s the inconsistency of the Church’s position in terms of many things, including IVF, which I spoke about in “Family Planningand Fertility Procedures”  that creates the issue here. No one is contesting that Catholics can refuse to get an insurance provider who allows contraception to be covered, but it’s a bit pointless to refuse something if it’s otherwise affordable healthcare. You don’t have to get the contraception, so it’s a vicarious objection to the mere presence of an insurance company paying for birth control if you yourself do not use it. A lot of this is splitting hairs in terms of how much one’s religious objections should matter in terms of what is a national matter of healthcare and thus affects people of no religion or faith as much as it does those of faith, and even those who believe are divided about this issue. Strict opposition to birth control is only common in Catholicism, from what I understand, whereas virtually all Protestant groups have no real issue with people using it, though they might be particular about using it in marriage instead of “fornicating” as it were. The technicality is still there in terms of stigmatizing premarital sex, but using birth control is not considered a sin perse in Protestant theology so much as they would consider it sinful to have sex before marriage, which is ridiculous for reasons I could talk about in the future.

Let’s assume for a moment that birth control falls under basic care, though there is obviously a counter argument against this; that elective birth control, used in a context of sex outside of marriage in many cases, is not the same thing as essential birth control, used for medical reasons that are incidentally preventing pregnancy, but also maintaining reproductive health. But if birth control is a basic health right on the same level as regular vaccinations against diseases that we have covered by insurance, then the government has no real secular argument as to why they shouldn’t do so. Since birth control in the form of condoms prevents STDs to a great extent, it is not outside of reason to suggest that it is a form of basic healthcare, along with the birth control pill, used for many reasons beyond preventing pregnancy, which in itself is not something we should take lightly on the level of a common cold that we’ll just “get over”. Some women are biologically unsuitable for pregnancy and would have severe complications by even carrying the child. I know these are isolated incidents, but without knowing specifics of every person, why not lean on the side of safety and prevention instead of taking unnecessary risks with women, as if they are expendable because they could die from pregnancy or birth, but they also could bring a new life into the world? That is a disgusting perspective on women, who are much more than their reproductive potential or even their child rearing potential apart from having biological children of their own. If women are truly to be treated as equals sexually, they should be permitted to have control over their own reproduction, so as not to be bound by what amounts to a patriarchal system that restrains them by a notion that they cannot be expected to have sex without the possibility of having a child. That antiquated idea should be tossed out along with any sort of notion that women cannot do virtually all jobs that men can do, as long as they are qualified by skills and education. We do not need to handle women like they are glass, treat them as equals and they will show what is under the surface of what we perceive them to be, independent, capable and responsible. Until next time, Namaste and aloha

Mojave's Desert and the Military's Congress

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100511/ap_on_re_us/us_mojave_cross

I had found an editorial in a Chattanooga newspaper on this issue a while ago and made a mental note of it. But when I found an article through Yahoo News on this, I had to comment further on the issue in writing. The cross has been in the Mojave Desert for over 80 years and has been maintained through the Veterans of Foreign Wars (better known as the VFW) in some form or fashion since 1934. However, it also appears it has been funded by volunteer groups now, though their connection to the government is evident, since it was through government action that the plot of land has been shifted to a privately owned sector instead of what was originally public land. The issue comes from a case ten years ago from a former national park employee, arguing that the cross’ presence was unconstitutional on the grounds that it stood as an explicit federal support for the Christian religion.

The point of the 7-foot memorial was for soldiers who had died in the war and I can respect that, as little interest as I hold in their affairs or the general use of military force. It is good to have some form of memorial for those who have died in service to the country they held allegiance to, but the use of the symbol seems objectionable on a number of grounds, the first being that it was initially funded by a government organization, the VFW. This objection falls flat since it has been maintained by volunteers through private funds not related to taxpayer money. The second objection is stronger since the government, even if it is not directly supporting the existence of the memorial, is using their power to preserve its existence. The relation of the cross to what is a federally maintained group, the military, is undeniable. Even if the cross has been recently situated legally in a now private patch of land, the government’s involvement cannot be ignored. Their legal action was what allowed the cross to persist as a memorial for fallen soldiers. Vicariously, through VFW volunteers, Congress is still violating the establishment clause in respecting an established religion.

Similar to the National Day of Prayer incident, the issue hinges on how people interpret language and in this case, symbols. The argument for keeping the cross suggested that it did not stand just for Christianity, but for the graves of all the soldiers. The difficulty there is that it assumes that every soldier who died would have wanted a Christian cross on their graves. The rhetoric also tries to suggest the cross is a universal symbol of sacrifice, which is equally untrue. As one dissenting justice noted, the cross “is the symbol of one particular sacrifice, and that sacrifice carries deeply significant meaning for those who adhere to the Christian faith." To try to extend the meaning of a religious symbol into a secular idea is difficult not only because of the rooted understanding of the symbol, but that many believers would no doubt strongly object to the compromise of their highly sacred mark on grounds of protecting it. The existence of religious symbols in public life is not what the case is about. I see memorial crosses for children on the roads in Tennessee and I don’t object to them, especially since they are commonly privately funded. It’s when the government initially supports the existence of the memorial cross for 80 years on public land and then makes a land exchange to keep the cross protected that I have a problem. The motive was a combination of protecting the cross as a memorial that was religiously neutral in some sense, but also attempting to maintain its position as a historical monument. Both of these cases fail on the same grounds. The court is on the one hand purposely ignoring or skewing the intent and message of the Christian symbol to make it accessible to people who don’t feel the same about the cross and on the other is trying to extend the definition of a monument to what is a use of a particularly Christian religious symbol to commemorate the deaths of soldiers, many of which are Christian, but not all.

The dissenting position is quite similar to my own; the need for a memorial for the soldiers who have died is evident today with casualties still occurring in the Middle East. But for the government or even private groups to think that the way to show respect and honor the fallen is through a particular religious symbol is not only mistaken in looking at the religious diversity of the army, but also forgets that the establishment clause is larger in scope than just founding a “state religion”. When it says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” it seems clear that it is saying that no religion should be given special treatment through government legislation or action. And in this case, the cross is favoring the Christian symbol of sacrifice as the best way to commemorate the deaths of soldiers from many faiths. In this way, the unconstitutional nature of the cross’ presence is quite evident. To maintain that a status quo of Christian believers who support the troops or that some personal emotional investment in the cross should be the standard for why you keep such a symbol as the way to remember the valor of the armed forces is not only logically unsound but degrading.

No one symbol can communicate the respect and anguish a person feels for one who has died in service. As popular and meaningful as it is to people who believe in Jesus Christ, I don’t feel it’s either appropriate or fair to use it as the way to show respect to those who protect the freedom to practice one’s faith without interference or special merit from the government. If you want to make a private memorial for Christian soldiers who have died in the line of duty, that’s your prerogative and you can do it through legal methods and with your own funds. But to suggest that you make what was a government established National Reserve alter the status of one patch of land in order to maintain the existence of a cross that could be moved to a privately owned area is not only showing blatant favoritism towards the demographic majority of Christians in this country, but compromising the government’s supposed neutrality towards religion because you bend to the will of the people whenever it suits the majority. I’m not suggesting the cross be torn down, so don’t misunderstand. The protection of religious exercise is just as important as the need for the government to be as neutral as possible on religious establishments. So why try to protect religious exercise on the one hand while contradicting yourself on the supposed need for neutrality on those religious exercises? I’m just asking for the government to be consistent. Until next time, Namaste and Aloha.

The Military and the Cross

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_fort_carson_cross
Even though I’ve already put in my two cents on the recent scandal with the National Day of Prayer, I found this short article this morning and thought I’d do a quick commentary on it. A symbol at an army hospital, Evans Army Community Hospital, at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs is being appealed to be removed since not only is the emblem a cross with a pointed base (allegedly used by Christian pilgrims to mark a camp site) but the phrase in Latin translates to “For God and humanity”. The representative Lt. Col. Steve Wollman argues that the symbol has been accepted by the army since 1969 and that references to doctors serving God and humanity go back to Hippocrates, the originator of the Hippocratic Oath used unofficially by many doctors today. The problem with that argument is that the original text swears to Apollo, Asclepius and Panacea among other Greek deities. Ancient Greeks weren’t disposed to swearing to one creator God in their times, so noting that medical pledges to gods in the ancient times were common practice doesn’t mean that it should be the case now, especially with the religious diversity of the army that is recognized today.

I imagine the reason this symbol has even persisted as long as it has is due in part to the Latin itself, which not many people are especially fluent in or able to read well enough to translate the explicit Abrahamic reference to god with a capital G. Not to mention they could’ve written it off with the pointed base of the cross differing enough from Christian crosses to be considered neutral. According to Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the association of the cross image with Middle Age Christianity and the Crusade mentality of spreading the faith across the world would send a negative message to Muslims and even soldiers associated with the hospital; that message being that the U.S. army is waging some Christian war on terror and more explicitly, Islam in the Middle East. And at least half of the people that lodged the complaint anonymously (because they didn’t want their superiors to know about it, making me that much less inclined to associate with the military at all; thanks conscientious objector status) were Protestant or Catholic, so to say this is some attack on Christianity by non Christians is an absurd argument. All in all, I can’t see why the group can’t use another symbol. Especially since it occurs to me that the military is not exactly one to accept standing out a great deal, valuing conformity to tradition and authority over needless self expression. To say the army wants robots for soldiers is another topic in itself, but changing the symbol shouldn’t be a large change. Using the symbol of the Red Cross would be a better choice in my eyes, however religious in nature it may initially appear. Anyway, until my next article, Namaste and Aloha.