Held Sacred: Free Speech

At some point here, I’m going to write a further post on how “sunshine” and whatnot can in fact make many situations worse rather than always making things better.  Today isn’t that day alas.  While trolling the Internet, I learned that kitty porn crush videos were an essential element of our freedom.  This didn’t bother me too much until I learned that it was Chief Justice Roberts offering this opinion in United States v. Stevens.  I quote Stanely Fish here:

The proverbial ordinary citizen, however, may be surprised to learn that, according to Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion, the First Amendment must be read to allow the production and dissemination of so called “crush videos,” videos (and I quote from Roberts’ opinion) that “feature the intentional torture and killing of helpless animals” often by women wearing high-heeled “spike” shoes who slowly “crush animals to death” while talking to them in “a kind of dominatrix patter” as they scream and squeal “in great pain.”

…

He simply invokes the post-New York Times v. Sullivan mantra and flatly rejects any “balancing of relative social costs and benefits “when it comes to speech. “The First Amendment,” he declares, “reflects a judgment by the American people that the benefits of its restrictions . . . outweigh the costs,” a judgment that he insists can not be revised “simply on the basis that some speech is not worth it.” In short, the balancing Roberts rejects has already occurred in the empyrean of First Amendment theory and the conclusion, given in advance, is that, aside from a direct incitement to violence or an act of treason, no expressive activity can be worthless enough to forfeit its constitutional protection. So much for the kittens.

Do read the whole thing.  Needless to say that this is another reminder that just because one is right on one issue, allegedly, doesn’t mean that he isn’t wrong on a whole mess of issues.  It’s days like these that remind me that we shouldn’t evaluate people merely on what is a major part of our own agenda, but what is a major part of the prospective person’s agenda.