The Left's Assault on First Amendment

DON’T SPEAK YOUR MIND IF YOU CAN’T DO THE TIME:

By 2011, The OIC would call for “constructively engaging to bridge divergent views on the limits to the right to freedom of opinion and expression.” The Obama administration would hurry to cross that bridge, with Secretary Clinton calling in the same year for the utilization of “old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming.”
Also in the same year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates would call Terry Jones—pastor of a small Florida church—and urge him not to conduct a protest which was scheduled to include a public burning of the Quran. Top U.S. General David Petraeus publicly “condemned” the stunt and warned that the act would put U.S. troops at risk in Afghanistan.
However odious one might find the burning of books, it is undoubtedly legal speech under traditional American jurisprudence. Rather than pointing out that the U.S. military exists to defend the rights of its citizens to speak freely—even imprudently—Petraeus inverted the relationship between the citizenry and soldiery, such that our forces in Afghanistan were now regarded as little more than hostages to the good behavior of Americans, lest they do or say something our enemies (or for that matter supposed Afghan allies) might object to.
Jones eventually succumbed to the pressure and relented, which didn’t stop the city of Gainesville, where Jones resided, from billing the church $200,000 for the security costs associated with his demonstration.
And of course, the arrest of Nakoula in 2012 made clear that the Obama Administration had moved well beyond mere “peer pressure and shaming” to fully adopt the logic of the “test of consequences.”
With governmental acquiescence, this insidious logic spread to society at large.

Read the whole thing.

28Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll   

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