Category Archives: rights

More on Free Speech

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It would seem that civility is in the ear of the speaker.  The Wichita Eagle mentions, courtesy of those evil Koch brothers, some examples of civility from our Progressive…acquaintances.  Last Thursday, it seems, Charles Koch authorized the release of a large sampling of the emails he, his company, and his employees have been getting over the last year, or so.

Among the incisive, tightly reasoned arguments offered him and his from the civil Left are these:

I hope you all DIE.

You people are ruining our country, and all for $$$.

And an especially cogent pair of correspondences:

Choose your expiration Date, Brothers….

The Koch brothers will DIE!!!!!

These careful insights aren’t limited to the ordinary Left, either.  The NLMSM also rises to the occasion, albeit more…subtly.  In an AP article picked up by The Northwestern from USA Today, we find this:

Wichita Police Lt. Doug Nolte said Friday that the last reports the department had on file from Koch were in 2010 involving a complaint about someone putting signs on his property and a 2009 arrest for trespassing at his house.

Not a word on the nature of this Progressive civility—just had it been (lightly) reported to the authorities.

On the other hand, we have this from none other than Elliot Spitzer.  According to The Daily Caller, in an interview with Bill Maher, he offered this in the context of the free speech rights of a corporation (like Koch Industries, or Time Warner, which owns HBO, which carries “Real Time with Bill Maher”):

Your show is owned by a corporation.  You have a First Amendment right. And so I don’t know how you distinguish between the New York Times editorial page, The Rachel Maddow Show, George [Stephanopoulos]‘s show — all owned by corporations.

The First Amendment shall pass no law abridging the right of speech.

Doesn’t say by anybody. It says speech. I don’t care whose speech it is.

That’s how Progressive civility fits in.

Entitlement

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On a recent broadcast, Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly asked whether the United States was becoming a nation whose population demanded entitlement—”Are we a welfare nation?” [and select the Talking Points Memos tab, then the Talking Points: 2/14|Are we a welfare nation? link.]

Then comes an article in The Weekly Standard by Heather Mac Donald titled “Affirmative Disaster.”  Here Ms Donald describes a rigorously executed bit of research conducted at Duke University that indicates that students granted admission to Duke according to racial preference criteria rather than academic performance don’t fare as well as classmates who didn’t get an affirmative action boost, but were admitted instead on the basis of academic performance.

What’s interesting here, though, is the hue and cry raised over the paper.  Despite the rigor with which the research was carried out, the authors were decried, not so much for being outright racist—not in this day and age—but for “re-opening old racial wounds.”  A senior research scholar (Donald’s term, not mine), Tim Tyson, wrote an op-ed that insisted the paper was a “political tract disguised as scholarly inquiry,” and that it was a “crusade to reduce the numbers of black students at elite institutions.”

Others of the school’s leadership were just, plain squishy.  Provost Peter Lange bleated

We understand how the conclusions of the research paper can be interpreted in ways that reinforce negative stereotypes.

And then

At the same time, our goal of academic success for all should not inhibit research and discussion to clarify important issues of academic choice and achievement.

None of the criticism (I hesitate to call them critiques) addressed the research itself, just the implications for the efficacy of affirmative action programs and their fairness to the minorities victimizedsupported by them.

Donald concludes

[U]ntil it becomes possible to discuss the effects of preferences without being accused of racial animus, it may be impossible to dislodge academic affirmative action, no matter how discredited its purported justifications.

Or, don’t you dare interfere with our affirmative action programs.  We deserve them.

I conclude that the answer to O’Reilly’s question is, “Apparently yes.”

Information Flow, PRC Style

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Last month the People’s Republic of China’s government news service, Xinhua News Service, carried a statement from the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) concerning the PRC’s decision about what the Chinese people will be permitted to see on theirthe government’s television sets.  The translation is courtesy of NightWatch.

A recently implemented rule has effectively curbed the “excessive entertainment” trend as two-thirds of the entertainment programs on China’s 34 satellite channels have been cut….  According to an SARFT directive last October, each of the country’s satellite channels would be limited to broadcasting two entertainment programs each week and a maximum of 90 minutes of content defined as entertainment every day during primetime….  The directive also required channels to broadcast at least two hours of news programming.

The restricted programs on the SARFT list include dating shows, talent contests, talk shows as well as emotional stories that were deemed ‘excessive entertainment’ and of “low taste.”  …the satellite channels have started to broadcast programs that promote traditional virtues and socialist core values.  The newly-added programs…are documentaries as well as cultural and educational programs….  The SARFT believes that the move to cut entertainment programming is crucial in improving cultural services for the public….

Nothing like limiting speech “for their own good.”  The Chinese people apparently are sufficiently bereft in judgment that they cannot be left to their own devices—or to their own decisions concerning what speech they might wish to hear.

KnightWatch reminds us that the PRC does not have freedom of speech.  It’s important to note, also, that these broadcasting restrictions are consistent with another fundamental ideological position of the PRC: free markets, free speech, freedom of association, and so on are not inalienable rights; they are privileges granted by government, to be adjusted from time to time solely according to government judgment.

Consider also, the background of this broadcasting move.  In response to increasing influence in the PRC  by Western culture and ideas, which has been facilitated by increasing foreign trade (and some loosening of economic strictures in the direction of freer markets), which in turn helps foster an increasingly prosperous peasant and middle class population (at least by historical Chinese standards), Chinese leadership is pulling back and retightening restrictions.

Last fall, the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee approved an explicitly ideological foundation for cultural activities, announcing a new policy specifically to eliminate many Western entertainment shows and so limit much foreign influence.  Moreover, the PRC government earlier this year ordered internet service providers to ensure that microblog posters (a rough equivalent to the Western Twitter facility) have registered their accounts under their real names—no anonymity here. The government also has pressured those running the microblog platforms to censor themselves “voluntarily.”

So, I ask: of what is the PRC government so afraid?  Oh, wait—it’s the men populating the government…. And I ask further: why do we want these guys for our national banker?

h/t Business Insider

Contraception Regulation

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Others have some thoughts on this, along with matters carefully ignoredmissed by President Obama.

Ruth Ann Daily of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette points out a principle that was well understood in our early days, but that our former University of Chicago Senior Lecturer in Constitutional Law seems to have…forgotten.

She describes an 1801 exchange of letters between Thomas Jefferson and a coalition of Baptist ministers from Connecticut, where the Congregationalist Church was supported by all citizens’ state taxes [emphasis added].

The “Danbury Baptists” and other minorities…could seek an exemption certificate that would route their taxes to their own church, but in practice, many municipalities made that difficult to do, and in principle, the Baptists argued, it was wrong:

“What religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights,” they wrote to Jefferson, “and these favors we receive at the expense of such degrading acknowledgements, as are inconsistent with the rights of freemen.”

Jefferson’s response extolled the “wall of separation between church and state,” a metaphor borrowed from Rhode Island founder Roger Williams. The Baptists and the deist skeptic are still right, 210 years later: An exemption, by definition, establishes one worldview over another and relegates dissenters to second-class status. Therefore the government must abstain from any such sphere where its presence is not absolutely necessary — as in forcing employers or insurance companies to dispense free contraceptives.

Caroline May of The Daily Caller describes another aspect of this problem that Obama…missed: some insurance providers are “religious organizations whose beliefs preclude them from offering birth control.”

She quotes Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission:

Let’s just take Southern Baptists, there are 16 million of us, almost all of us are covered by a self-funded insurance program called GuideStone.  So when he says “well you don’t have to pay for it, your insurance company will,” our insurance company is a Southern Baptist insurance company, it is self-funded through the denomination, so it is totally unconscionable for them to provide abortifacients.

As Land put it

My initial reaction is: How dumb does he think we are?  Does he think when he puts lip stick on a pig, that we don’t understand that it is still a pig?

Hmm….

Misleading Campaign for the Contraceptive Mandate

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Senators Jeanne Shaheen, Barbara Boxer, and Patty Murray (D; NH, CA, and WA, respectively) have an Op-Ed piece in The Wall Street Journal that contributes to the disinformation being spread about concerning this diktat.

They begin with their opening premise:

…the Obama administration changed the law to require private health plans to provide preventive services including breast exams, HIV screening and contraception for free.

They actually think no one is paying for this mandate?  They actually think no tax increases, no insurance premium increases, no reductions in services or policy option flexibility will result from this?  No, they don’t think that: these are grown, adult human beings, of far above average intelligence.  Of course they know better.

They go on:

…the real forces behind [an alleged campaign to deny this “benefit” to women]…are trying to force their politics on women’s personal health-care decisions.

Of course, this mandate in no way seeks to impose government’s politics to override the fundamental teachings of a broad reach of religions and religious institutions.  Nosirreebob.

And

Contraception was included as a required preventive service on the recommendation of the independent, nonprofit Institute of Medicine and other medical experts because it is essential to the health of women and families.

Aside from the fact that, as feminists used to protest—correctly—pregnancy isn’t a disease, pregnancy prevention (and cancelation) mechanisms are widely available already.  Not overriding religious teachings, not canceling religious tenets, in no way impacts this.

And

Those now attacking the new health-coverage requirement claim it is an assault on religious liberty, but the opposite is true.  Religious freedom means that Catholic women who want to follow their church’s doctrine can do so, avoiding the use of contraception in any form.

It also means that religious institutions—including “institutions that have historic religious ties but also have a broader mission, such as hospitals and universities”—do not have to cast aside their fundamental beliefs, do not have to submit to a government order to ignore those teachings.  Catholic—and other—women still can exercise their religious freedom.  And they still have access to contraception and abortions absent this government intrusion.

The good Senators’ disingenuous claim to the contrary, this mandate has nothing to do with women’s health, except in the most peripheral, side effect way.  It is exactly an assault on religious liberty, it is a deliberate reach for political power and an assertion of government’s authority over what will be permitted to be taught by religious institutions and what teachings will be permitted to be obeyed by related institutions.  This is an attempt to bring down Jefferson’s wall of separation between Church & State, and nothing else.

Congresswoman Gwen Moore (D, WI) makes this plain.  She has said that the church

…can’t impose its religious views on people and whether they can have health care.

However, it’s the government that’s imposing its religious view: religions must act contrary to their fundamental tenets because Government requires it.  Moreover, “the church” certainly can impose its religious views.  It’s what a church is.  It’s God’s Word—regardless of the religion at hand—that’s being taught.  The question of individual conscience, as the Catholic Church (for instance) teaches, is still a matter among the individual, the church, and God—government is, in no way, permitted to interfere here.

Yet government is doing everything it can to interfere.