Daily Archives: 23 November 2020

An Adjacent Issue

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A group wants to paint the message “Black Pre-Born Lives Matter” on a street outside a Planned Parenthood site near Capitol Hill in DC. The city’s government has refused to issue the necessary permit, and police arrested two folks who tried just to chalk the message rather than paint it. The group now has sued in Federal court over the refusal and subsequent prevention of painting; the suit reads, in pertinent part,

Your original decision to paint “Black Lives Matter” on the street is government speech. However, your decision to allow protestors to paint “Defund the Police” opened the streets up as a public forum. You are not permitted to discriminate on the basis of viewpoint in making determinations relating to public assemblies in public fora[.]

That raises the adjacent issue. Government speech wants citizen speech in answer, also, or what’s a First Amendment for?

Tyranny and the First Amendment

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On the matter of Target’s initial attempt to ban a book (Irreversible Damage: the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters for those following along) because some folks objected to it, followed by Target’s reversal and decision to sell the book after all, a letter-writer published in The Wall Street Journal‘s Thursday Letters had this remark:

Lobbying the government to make a book illegal is pro-book banning. Lobbying Target to take a book off the shelves is pro-capitalism.

This is not even close to correct. Lobbying Target to take a book off the shelves is suppression of speech, even when done by private citizens.

Not buying the book is capitalism. Encouraging one’s fellows to not buy the book—boycotting the book—is capitalism.

Demanding the book not be sold denies others those same choices, along with denying them their opposing choice to buy the book. That’s at the core of tyranny.