Just Words Part 1

I don’t like talking down to people. Simply because I don’t like being talked down to myself. Big pet peeve. So I try not to do it. I don’t always succeed – I am over six feet tall and have kind of a nasally voice due to a deviated septum, and so have been told that I sometimes come off as arrogant. It surprises me, frankly, how rarely this happens.

Because of this dislike of talking down to people, when I am in a conversation with someone I proceed from the assumption that they know everything that I know. I’m not talking about beliefs here. Beliefs are the way that you INTERPRET knowledge, not knowledge itself.

A co-worker asked me today if I was “leaning” toward one presidential candidate or another. I expressed my enthusiasm for Barack Obama. Honestly, in my adult life, Obama is the first candidate that I’ve really felt like I can support without reservation – not because he’s the best of a bad lot, but because he could actually do some GOOD for this country.

As we discussed this, another co-worker who leans conservative came over. For some reason, God knows why, she enjoys asking me questions and listening to me talk. I constantly challenge her because I believe that she has rather a narrow view of Christianity, like so many modern Christians do, and that is (as it should be with a Christian) the start of her worldview. Maybe that’s why she enjoys listening to me – I’m not sure.

At any rate, she expressed enthusiasm for the “ideas” of Sarah Palin. Personally, I think that Sarah Palin is a woman-hater. If she were a man with the views that she has, she’d be labeled a misogynist. Primarily, it turns out, this coworker supports Ms. Palin because of Ms. Palin’s views on abortion. She said that she believed a president should try to make their “beliefs” into law. I responded “The first amendment to the Constitution says that Congress shall make no law either respecting the practice of religion or restricting it’s free practice.”

She honestly didn’t understand what I meant, and she had to go back to work (and I was on my way out the door) so I didn’t have time to explain.

I think that this just exemplifies one of the main reasons that America is allowing itself to be led around by the nose by Mr. Bush and his cronies… even if we know the words of the Bill of Rights, that’s all that they are to most of us… words. Disconnected from any real meaning, disconnected from our lives. Just words. As a matter of fact, two republican White House staffers resigned, alleging that they were too upset to work for Mr. Bush when they overheard him refer to the Constitution as “Just a God-damned piece of paper.”

So let’s start with an explanation of what, exactly, the Bill of Rights is. Put simply, it is the first ten amendments to the constitution. Kind of the American “Ten Commandments”. The Constitution was ratified in 1787, but not to everyone’s delight. There were problems with the document. Things that it hadn’t addressed. We were an America trying to find our footing, redefining ourselves after kicking out a monarchy, and we didn’t want to be replaced by another one. America was brand spanking new, and already the fragile young country was falling apart over the very document that defines WHO we are. So the Congress collected input from the citizens as to what they thought needed to be amended, and hammered out the bill of rights – basically a way to protect us from our own government.

So what are these “just words” and what do they mean? Well, let’s take a look at each of them and what they might mean.

The first Amendment, number one with a bullet, covers most of the basic rights that we were deprived of under the rule of mad King George. (No, not the one in the White House – the one who ruled England at the time of our independence.) It reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Because so many of our basic rights are enumerated here, we’ll take these one at a time.

The first portion of this, commonly referred to as “freedom of religion” is probably the most important. We have to remember that the first immigrants from England came here to escape religious persecution. The people were taxed to support the state religion and the religious institutions were in turn taxed for the government. If you held some religious belief that was no sanctioned by the British crown, you either had to meet in secret, or allow yourself to be forced into ghettos like the Jews and the Catholics. To this day, one of the many titles for the queen is “Her Protestant Majesty”. Since the days of King Henry the Eighth, the king or queen of England is generally accepted to be the head of the Church of England, and Americans were sick of it. We wanted our state free from the influence of any church, and our churches free from state influence.

What this means, basically, is that churches do not pay taxes and are, therefore, exempt from an active role in our political system, and that the state may not have any say in the way that churches are run. In other words, no law can be passed simply because you believe that it is what God wants, and you get to worship God in your own way without government interference.

The first part of this explains why protestant conservatives are having such a hard time denying homosexuals the right to marry. Marriage in America is a civic right, not strictly a religious right. It also explains why Roe Vs. Wade has proven so bullet-proof to attacks from the religious right. Arguments against both of these boil down to “that’s the way that God wants it.” Religious groups keep trying and failing to couch these arguments in secular terms, but as these secular arguments are gunned down one after the other, it always comes down to the religious argument, which is Constitutionally invalid.

Part of the reason that we’re still having arguments about the first half of this amendment is because of the success that conservatives have had in violating the second half. Mormons and Hassidic Jews, for instance, are denied their (in their view) God-given right to plural marriage by American anti-polygamy laws. Native Americans and Rastafarians are denied their rights to use peyote and marijuana respectively by American drug laws. I will not extend this argument to a Satanists right to human sacrifice, because by sacrificing someone you are depriving them of their rights, whereas neither of the first affect the rights of another in any significant way.

Look, personally, I am a Christian. Do I think that God wants us to have abortions? I would argue from my personal belief structure that God does not. Does God want us to be gay? Who knows. But in both of these cases, it boils down to the same thing… these people have their own reckoning with God, not with me. I cannot tell others how to live, just as they cannot tell me how to live.

The next portion of this is what is commonly called “freedom of speech”. That means that, in America, you get to say what you what, how you want, when you want and no one can interfere with that, and, more importantly, you cannot be jailed for your speech. A coworker who had been “written up” for expressing a political opinion while they were on a register, asked me if this right extends to the workplace. Believe it or not, the answer is “No, it doesn’t” for the simple reason that when you accept a job, you agree to play by the rules set forth by your employer while you are “on the clock”. If your speech upsets a customer, then the company is perfectly within their rights to reprimand you. They cannot, however, call the cops.

This is a right that has required some refinement over the years. Probably the first time that any refinement was taken to this right was when Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes declared it a criminal act to scream “fire” in a crowded theatre, with the explanation that your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. In other words, if your words cause direct and immediate harm to another, then you have to accept responsibility for that harm.

A more recent debate over free speech has erupted over so-called “virtual” child pornography. We all want to protect children, (all of us except predators, that is,) and so the question becomes “at what point does this desire to protect children infringe upon an individual’s right to free speech?”

For those who don’t know, “virtual” child porn is a depiction of sexual contact with a child, where no actual child was involved.

For me, this comes down to one simple maxim… no virtual crime is prosecutable in an American court. Agree with it or not, like it or not, it is not prosecutable. Hasn’t stopped courts from prosecuting it, mind you, but to me these prosecutions are amazingly unconstitutional. Another quote attributed to Justice Holmes is that the truest test of free speech is when you can defend speech that you yourself find reprehensible.

Every week on television, we see a crime drama that involves kidnapping. How many of these producers, writers, directors and actors have been brought up on charges of “virtual” kidnapping? Zero.

Our popular culture revels in virtual depictions of murder. One of my favorite crime dramas is the Showtime series “Dexter”, about a serial killer who works as a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami police department. Almost every week, Dexter kills someone. How many “virtual” murder charges have been leveled against Michael C. Hall or the other creators of Dexter? None.

Same goes for depictions of rape, incest, or any other form of mayhem. The laws should be concentrating on protecting REAL children, not virtual children.

As a matter of fact, an argument can be made that fantasy material may actually go some way toward PROTECTING children because it gives people who may otherwise harm an actual child an outlet that prevents them from doing so. I wonder how many potential killers have been kept from murdering by the simple expedient that they can experience this vicariously by re-renting “Friday the 13th”?

This does not, however, cover actions. Several child pornographers… I’m talking about people who actually produce photographs and films of children involved in sexual activity… have tried to argue that their prosecutions violate the first amendment. This is untrue for the same reason that Satanists cannot sacrifice humans and you cannot yell “fire” in a crowded theatre. They are causing clear and immediate harm to another human being.

The next portion of this, and arguably the most important for a free democracy, is the so-called “freedom of the press”. This means simply that the government cannot shut down an outlet of the media or jail the creators simply because it expresses an opinion that the government does not like.

The final portion of the first amendment, the portion covering “freedom of assembly”, means simply that the government cannot take action against you for peaceable protests, or for writing to your representative.

Again, some finessing has been required on these rights over the years. If, for instance, your protest stops traffic, then it can pretty easily be stated that you are creating an immediate hazard to the lives and health of others. This is why, when a demonstration erupts in violence, you hear the question “what precipitated the violence?” If the protestors started the violence by writing or clubbing policemen, as is claimed happened in Seattle’s WTO riots, then police have the right to shut the demonstration down. If, however, first blood was drawn by the representatives of the government, as happened so often during America’s civil rights struggles, then the interference is deemed unconstitutional.

It was my intention to approach the entire bill of rights in this entry, but as I realize that I have spent four pages simply discussing the first amendment, and my eyes are starting to cross, I realize that this is an unrealistic expectation, both upon myself as author and upon you as readers. I will, therefore, call a moratorium on further discussion until tomorrow night and go rest my eyes and fingers. I will just close this one, as well as tomorrow night’s with the simple plea of “Know your rights”. If you know them, then they are much harder to take away from you.

Peace.

Randal