First Amendment Censorship

In my last few posts, I have been taking a rather polemic view fo the current sociopolitical environment of the United States and its policies. However, there are much more subtle effects that are happening all around me as I speak that trouble me greatly for the coherence of our Union as a whole.

THis entry will focus on the occurrence of an increasingly familiar use of the First Amendment as a mitigation of a form of populist censorship.

For example, a close colleague of mine works for an online university. I say this only in passing to contexualize the setting. The adjuncts there regularly share experiences in a Faculty Lounge, and of course the subject came to the matter of the Second Gulf War at the time of its beginning. This is when the coourrence that I am referring to began, and has continued in some sense to the time of this writing.

In this setting a wide variety of viewpoints were put forth, and as is the case in the larger society in the US at this time, the more Hawkish individuals accused the more pacifist ones as being unpatriotic, etc. The flame war raged on. However, a couple week sinto the war in microcosm, another agenda came out. Seems that a recurring trope that has surfaced is that dissidents on the forum have been admonished that they shoudl thank God that they have the right to free speech. This is due to the 'fact' as stated, that "...if they were in Iraq, they would be (insert some unimaginable horror, such as torture, maiming, rape, etc here) for their treason"

First of all, I'm going to keep mmy remarks limited to the secular, as even my neighbor recently stated to me that "This is the US, and we do have freedom of speech", a less religiously charged version fo the same statement. But what worries me here is that there is the implication that the First Amendment is a 'privilege' under Constitutional Law that one should think very carefully about before using it. I believe in caution when using this freedom more as a sense of civility and moral obligation to others as a human being with a decent sense of ethics. However, it is very disturbing that something that is guaranteed as a right under the social contract of the United States Constitution, while it might be said that the respect for it is welcome, the sense that it is somehow now held as a concept which should be used with caution and is tacitly held circumspect by this populist undercurrent. And although I have only used two examples, I have come upon this at least half a dozen times over the past two months.

In addition, it seems that the First Amendment has been in slow erosion for a while, but now speeded up through the current administration. Those who speak in an 'improper' fashion as 'improper' times have been incarcerated and transferred to military facilities as enemy combatants. Although this is the extreme case, private spaces such as shopping malls operate under the policies of the companies operating them, not allowing protest, etc. In fact, recent actions by Dow Chemical prove that the freedom of speech on the Internet, by virtue of the DMCA, is a 'right' only 'guaranteed' by the corporations maintaining the bandwidth.

But I digress.

I think that I should cap this entry mainly with the the apparent social undercurrent with what seems to be a growing number of Americans that I come in contact with that the existence of the First Amendment is precisely the reason why we should censor ourselves. Whether this is to not appear unpatriotic, or disrespectful, or even impolite seems to be a good intent for an argument that in effect undermines itself. And of course this is nothing new, as similar memes have been extant during other 'wartimes', although there are key differences in our time that go beyond the scope of this note.

It is my contention that while the freedom of speech, while still guaranteed by US Constitutional Law as a right that this idea that although I believe in a certain level of respect and civility, freedom of expression should be pushed to its limit at any opportunity.