A Long Introduction
You’re an American, right? Okay, then you have certain protected freedoms, certain rights, one of which is freedom of speech; another, freedom of peaceful assembly. But for most Americans, and maybe for you, those freedoms are daily irrelevant. It’s only when you are personally prohibited that such issues rise to importance. (Recall my adage that that which is not personal is meaningless—conversely, that which is personal is meaningful)
Now imagine living in Seattle under Mayor Jenny Durkan during “the summer of love.”
Remember Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s (demonstrably foolish) characterization of civil disarray in her city as a “summer of love”? Anarchists ran a section of the city. The “love” resulted in at least one murder in the so-called eight-block Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) zone, as Marcel Long shot Horace Lorenzo Anderson. Chalk up another failure of Leftwing policies as another young life was lost to Leftist ideology and ineptitude. Chalk up failure of unchecked freedom. Yes, that claim about Leftist ideology is possibly an unwarranted class condemnation, but predominantly Democrat-run cities do appear to have more problems with crime than Republican-run. Areas.
But Durkin’s response and related statements by other Democrat leaders coupled with inaction demonstrate that policy can lead to tragedy. And CHOP’s ugly destruction begs two questions: 1) Can policy avert tragedy by imposing statutes and laws that result in fines and imprisonment? 2) How far Left or Right should Americans go to ensure freedom for individuals while protecting the population at large?:
Giuliani’s New York City: the Stop and Frisk Policy
Just recall the accelerated decline in crime in Rudy Giuliani’s NY City. His policies went into effect during a decrease in crime statistics show, but they enhanced that decline, making the city safer. Are there dangers in going too far Right? Of course.
According to Politifact by the Poynter Institute, “Giuliani instituted a zero-tolerance approach to crime-fighting, which allowed police to stop and frisk suspicious people and make arrests for minor infractions that once had been ignored.” * Personal for you? Probably only if you lived in New York City where you were stopped by cops because you looked suspicious. Draconian? Not really; it was a tradeoff: Safer city for the majority through fewer freedoms for the criminal minority and some collaterally affected innocents. As Politifact points out, The violent crime rate dropped by 56 percent during the eight years he served as mayor. Murder, down nearly two-thirds. Robbery, down 67 percent. Aggravated assault, down 28 percent.” Are you one whose jeopardy is worth more than your freedom to look suspicious? What if you have face tattoos, a beard, shaven head, a denim jacket with cutoff sleeves, and a scowl permanently drawn on your face by genetics? Hey, you look suspicious to me. You won’t be mistaken for Sister Mary Milk of Magnesia on her way to distribute bread to the poor.
Community Standards and the Freedom to Offend
Although the recent crime increase in NYC and other places might make some wish for a return to Giuliani-like policies, crime statistics aren’t the only motivation people have for curbing freedoms.
When long-held cultural traditions meet contemporary behaviors and speech, some communities have taken extreme measures that impinge on freedom. Book banning comes to mind as do movie and TV show ratings. When, for example, a person with a gender agenda runs a school library, the book choice might reflect the language and behavior of a small segment of the population or of the entertainment industry in general, but simultaneously offend a community’s long-held cultural traditions and, to use the legal term, community standards. This very conflict lay at the heart of problems between parents and school directors over the past four years and might even have led to the election of Virginia’s governor as a blowback from school board meetings.
In response to perceived threats to community stability, some local governments have attempted to impose fines or taxes on expressions or behaviors that they deemed to be “offensive” or disruptive. Thus, book banning has been part of all cultures since the rise of civilization. The extreme form of banning is, of course, book burning. **
From Banning Books to Banning Behavior to Banning Bans
When expression is tied to public displays of behavior, locals have instituted rules and restrictions with penalties. One example lies in communities that charge fees for certain public gatherings even though the Constitution protects the freedom to assemble. One such public gathering that draws a cost in paperwork and permission fees is a parade. Parades have been celebratory expressions since before the Roman Triumphs. They often mark anniversaries of significant events or heritage, but they could be as simple in scope as the start of a high school football season, a Homecoming Game, or a summer Little League. No, a parade isn’t a book, but it is definitely an expression, sometimes a religious expression as on St. Patrick’s Day or Halloween (night before All Saints’ Day, All Hallows’ Day). I assume that such a parade based on Christian history might offend a community predominantly composed of Muslims, but in the US parades take place under the protections of the First Amendment.
Even parades that commemorate historical, social, or religious events, such as the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Thanksgiving Day Parade, or Columbus Day Parade have recently become entwined with protecting freedoms because some groups link to those marches expressions and behaviors frowned upon by local communities. Need an example of parade as expression? A Gay Pride Parade. Such a parade is possible because of the First Amendment. And for proof, read Nicole Rosenthal’s NY Post article “LGBTQ groups finally invited to march in Staten Island St. Patrick’s Day Parade — ending NYC event’s decades-long anti-gay ban” (Nov. 12, 2024).***
Thus, as Ira H.Carmen writes (1967) in Movies, Censorship, and the Law a case regarding a local community’s ability to tax parade organizers and thus determine whether or not the event could occur, the Court determined that “a community possesses some inherent power of censorship over activities that, though protected by the First Amendment, were by their very nature a serious intrusion into the peace and order of a locality (36).****
Because America is a melting pot of ethnicity, it is difficult to pin down a precise meaning to community standards. Are you in favor of books on gay sex in elementary school libraries? If not, is it because of childhood development or because of a standard of heterosexuality? The latter bespeaks family, religious, or community standards; the former, the psychological and physiological realities of human development. And that dilemma begs yet another avenue of questioning: Is there a way to balance freedom and commonsense? Is there a way to balance free speech and protective rules? Maybe as a response to movements to ban books elsewhere in the country, in California, Liberal Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 1078 to ban book bans and textbook censorship in the state’s 10,000+ schools. *****
How far have we come since the days when the USPS imposed a ban on sending Lady Chatterley’s Lover through the mail? Now, you might be able to get a copy of the paperback Illustrated Lady Chatterley’s Lover in a California middle school. (Bet some of the pages are earmarked or missing)
The Peculiar Irony of Twenty-first Century America: Liberals for Censorship,
Liberals against Censorship
Gavin Newsom’s ban on bans stands in sharp contrast to censorship by liberals over the past four years. The demonstrable censorship imposed under the Biden Administration targeted dissenters and conservative voices on social media. Declaring the other side “Fascists,” Biden’s crew and sympathizers in many states did whatever they could to censor and ban in cooperation with private entities. Could there be a more Fascist-like demonstration that dictatorial control can emanate from the Left as well as from the Right? And the Left went further Left as it imposed Orwellian restrictions on language best exemplified in the military, where pronouns were elevated to a policy by the Pentagon, weaponizing language against American military personnel—surely a policy that had the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian military leaders shaking in their boots. “Oh no, Yakov, they have gender-neutral pronouns. How will we determine the sex of those who shoot at us?”
No argument against the evil of trying to control speech seems to have penetrated the very minds who claim liberalism as their hard-driving ideological motivation. Over the period from 2020 to the present, Americans saw liberals’ tyranny in almost every public sector. And it wasn’t just centered on respect for the humanity of those who might differ physically or psychologically from the general population. The Left’s movement to censor inhibited the freedom of commerce that entrepreneurs had enjoyed under America’s capitalist system. In Pennsylvania, for example, the government’s complete shut down of small businesses while allowing Walmart to remain open drove a friend of mine not only to close his bar, but also to commit suicide at the loss of his livelihood. When personal freedom is involved, freedom has meaning (Live free or die?).
Ironically, the very people who supposedly ascribe to freedom for all became the most hypocritical by censoring during the pandemic and by imposing closures on vast segments of the population. A Nancy Pelosi requiring masks in Congress but wearing no mask to her beauty salon or a Gavin Newsom closing restaurants but going to an expensive restaurant without a mask steeps contemporary liberalism in hypocrisy.
So Who Defends Your Freedom?
Do we trust the government to protect us? That’s not an easy question to answer after recent years of Deep State interference in media and social behavior. Consider words from a slightly different time, the words of Mr. Justice Michael Musmanno (PA) in the Hallmark Productions v. Carroll case:
“There is a very fallacious notion afloat on the waves of idle thought that in a free society, the least control makes for the biggest happiness. The slightest reflection will demonstrate that there could be considerable misery, not to say plagues and pestilences, if government did not hold an analytical and punitive eye on producers of medicine, drugs, foods, and beverages…A good citizen not only does not object but is happy for the fact that someone more skilled than he determines whether the can of peaches he opens…is free of deleterious ingredients. A worthy member of society who is just as much concerned about mental purity as he is over bodily cleanliness, is grateful that the government that protects him from contact with physical contagion will also save him from association with moral trash…” ******
Hmnn. Moral trash? Musmanno decided cases in the 1950s—the Hallmark case was 1956. THIS IS 2024. What Musmanno called trash you can now read or see inside California’s schools thanks to Gavin Newsom and the California legislature. At the same time, you better not use the wrong pronouns, back the wrong candidate, or question the directives, mandates, and regulations imposed by the government of California. Maybe the next 68 years will free us from today’s censorship just as the last 68 years freed us from the censorship of Musmanno’s era.
It looks as though freedom, your freedom, largely depends on your willingness to assemble to peacefully protest restrictions that self-proclaimed government experts and bureaucrats pushing an agenda might impose on you.
*https://www.politifact.com/article/2007/sep/01/how-much-credit-giuliani-due-fighting-crime/
**For a long list of book burning incidents see the Wikipedia article titled “List of book-burning incidents.”
***https://nypost.com/2024/11/12/us-news/lgbtq-groups-finally-invited-to-march-in-staten-island-st-patricks-day-parade-ending-nyc-events-decades-long-anti-gay-ban/
****Ann Arbor, MI. University of Michigan Press. Two germane cases were Cox v. New Hampshire (1941) and a case regarding the requirement of a person going door-to-door to evangelize in the manner of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Murdock v. Pennsylvania in which “a municipal ordinance which, as construed and applied, requires religious colporteurs (book and other literature peddlers) to pay a license tax as a condition to the pursuit of their activities, is invalid under the Federal Constitution as a denial of freedom of speech, press and religion.” You can see the problem: A community could require a Jehovah’s Witness to pay a tax just for walking around and knocking. (Yeah, some of you are saying, “Hey, I could see that, especially at supper time. And while we’re at it, how about those phone calls?)
*****California Bans Book Bans and Textbook Censorship in Schools
******Carmen. Op. cit., p. 243.
You’re an American, right? Okay, then you have certain protected freedoms, certain rights, one of which is freedom of speech; another, freedom of peaceful assembly. But for most Americans, and maybe for you, those freedoms are daily irrelevant. It’s only when you are personally prohibited that such issues rise to importance. (Recall my adage that that which is not personal is meaningless—conversely, that which is personal is meaningful)
Now imagine living in Seattle under Mayor Jenny Durkan during “the summer of love.”
Remember Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s (demonstrably foolish) characterization of civil disarray in her city as a “summer of love”? Anarchists ran a section of the city. The “love” resulted in at least one murder in the so-called eight-block Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) zone, as Marcel Long shot Horace Lorenzo Anderson. Chalk up another failure of Leftwing policies as another young life was lost to Leftist ideology and ineptitude. Chalk up failure of unchecked freedom. Yes, that claim about Leftist ideology is possibly an unwarranted class condemnation, but predominantly Democrat-run cities do appear to have more problems with crime than Republican-run. Areas.
But Durkin’s response and related statements by other Democrat leaders coupled with inaction demonstrate that policy can lead to tragedy. And CHOP’s ugly destruction begs two questions: 1) Can policy avert tragedy by imposing statutes and laws that result in fines and imprisonment? 2) How far Left or Right should Americans go to ensure freedom for individuals while protecting the population at large?:
Giuliani’s New York City: the Stop and Frisk Policy
Just recall the accelerated decline in crime in Rudy Giuliani’s NY City. His policies went into effect during a decrease in crime statistics show, but they enhanced that decline, making the city safer. Are there dangers in going too far Right? Of course.
According to Politifact by the Poynter Institute, “Giuliani instituted a zero-tolerance approach to crime-fighting, which allowed police to stop and frisk suspicious people and make arrests for minor infractions that once had been ignored.” * Personal for you? Probably only if you lived in New York City where you were stopped by cops because you looked suspicious. Draconian? Not really; it was a tradeoff: Safer city for the majority through fewer freedoms for the criminal minority and some collaterally affected innocents. As Politifact points out, The violent crime rate dropped by 56 percent during the eight years he served as mayor. Murder, down nearly two-thirds. Robbery, down 67 percent. Aggravated assault, down 28 percent.” Are you one whose jeopardy is worth more than your freedom to look suspicious? What if you have face tattoos, a beard, shaven head, a denim jacket with cutoff sleeves, and a scowl permanently drawn on your face by genetics? Hey, you look suspicious to me. You won’t be mistaken for Sister Mary Milk of Magnesia on her way to distribute bread to the poor.
Community Standards and the Freedom to Offend
Although the recent crime increase in NYC and other places might make some wish for a return to Giuliani-like policies, crime statistics aren’t the only motivation people have for curbing freedoms.
When long-held cultural traditions meet contemporary behaviors and speech, some communities have taken extreme measures that impinge on freedom. Book banning comes to mind as do movie and TV show ratings. When, for example, a person with a gender agenda runs a school library, the book choice might reflect the language and behavior of a small segment of the population or of the entertainment industry in general, but simultaneously offend a community’s long-held cultural traditions and, to use the legal term, community standards. This very conflict lay at the heart of problems between parents and school directors over the past four years and might even have led to the election of Virginia’s governor as a blowback from school board meetings.
In response to perceived threats to community stability, some local governments have attempted to impose fines or taxes on expressions or behaviors that they deemed to be “offensive” or disruptive. Thus, book banning has been part of all cultures since the rise of civilization. The extreme form of banning is, of course, book burning. **
From Banning Books to Banning Behavior to Banning Bans
When expression is tied to public displays of behavior, locals have instituted rules and restrictions with penalties. One example lies in communities that charge fees for certain public gatherings even though the Constitution protects the freedom to assemble. One such public gathering that draws a cost in paperwork and permission fees is a parade. Parades have been celebratory expressions since before the Roman Triumphs. They often mark anniversaries of significant events or heritage, but they could be as simple in scope as the start of a high school football season, a Homecoming Game, or a summer Little League. No, a parade isn’t a book, but it is definitely an expression, sometimes a religious expression as on St. Patrick’s Day or Halloween (night before All Saints’ Day, All Hallows’ Day). I assume that such a parade based on Christian history might offend a community predominantly composed of Muslims, but in the US parades take place under the protections of the First Amendment.
Even parades that commemorate historical, social, or religious events, such as the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Thanksgiving Day Parade, or Columbus Day Parade have recently become entwined with protecting freedoms because some groups link to those marches expressions and behaviors frowned upon by local communities. Need an example of parade as expression? A Gay Pride Parade. Such a parade is possible because of the First Amendment. And for proof, read Nicole Rosenthal’s NY Post article “LGBTQ groups finally invited to march in Staten Island St. Patrick’s Day Parade — ending NYC event’s decades-long anti-gay ban” (Nov. 12, 2024).***
Thus, as Ira H.Carmen writes (1967) in Movies, Censorship, and the Law a case regarding a local community’s ability to tax parade organizers and thus determine whether or not the event could occur, the Court determined that “a community possesses some inherent power of censorship over activities that, though protected by the First Amendment, were by their very nature a serious intrusion into the peace and order of a locality (36).****
Because America is a melting pot of ethnicity, it is difficult to pin down a precise meaning to community standards. Are you in favor of books on gay sex in elementary school libraries? If not, is it because of childhood development or because of a standard of heterosexuality? The latter bespeaks family, religious, or community standards; the former, the psychological and physiological realities of human development. And that dilemma begs yet another avenue of questioning: Is there a way to balance freedom and commonsense? Is there a way to balance free speech and protective rules? Maybe as a response to movements to ban books elsewhere in the country, in California, Liberal Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 1078 to ban book bans and textbook censorship in the state’s 10,000+ schools. *****
How far have we come since the days when the USPS imposed a ban on sending Lady Chatterley’s Lover through the mail? Now, you might be able to get a copy of the paperback Illustrated Lady Chatterley’s Lover in a California middle school. (Bet some of the pages are earmarked or missing)
The Peculiar Irony of Twenty-first Century America: Liberals for Censorship,
Liberals against Censorship
Gavin Newsom’s ban on bans stands in sharp contrast to censorship by liberals over the past four years. The demonstrable censorship imposed under the Biden Administration targeted dissenters and conservative voices on social media. Declaring the other side “Fascists,” Biden’s crew and sympathizers in many states did whatever they could to censor and ban in cooperation with private entities. Could there be a more Fascist-like demonstration that dictatorial control can emanate from the Left as well as from the Right? And the Left went further Left as it imposed Orwellian restrictions on language best exemplified in the military, where pronouns were elevated to a policy by the Pentagon, weaponizing language against American military personnel—surely a policy that had the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian military leaders shaking in their boots. “Oh no, Yakov, they have gender-neutral pronouns. How will we determine the sex of those who shoot at us?”
No argument against the evil of trying to control speech seems to have penetrated the very minds who claim liberalism as their hard-driving ideological motivation. Over the period from 2020 to the present, Americans saw liberals’ tyranny in almost every public sector. And it wasn’t just centered on respect for the humanity of those who might differ physically or psychologically from the general population. The Left’s movement to censor inhibited the freedom of commerce that entrepreneurs had enjoyed under America’s capitalist system. In Pennsylvania, for example, the government’s complete shut down of small businesses while allowing Walmart to remain open drove a friend of mine not only to close his bar, but also to commit suicide at the loss of his livelihood. When personal freedom is involved, freedom has meaning (Live free or die?).
Ironically, the very people who supposedly ascribe to freedom for all became the most hypocritical by censoring during the pandemic and by imposing closures on vast segments of the population. A Nancy Pelosi requiring masks in Congress but wearing no mask to her beauty salon or a Gavin Newsom closing restaurants but going to an expensive restaurant without a mask steeps contemporary liberalism in hypocrisy.
So Who Defends Your Freedom?
Do we trust the government to protect us? That’s not an easy question to answer after recent years of Deep State interference in media and social behavior. Consider words from a slightly different time, the words of Mr. Justice Michael Musmanno (PA) in the Hallmark Productions v. Carroll case:
“There is a very fallacious notion afloat on the waves of idle thought that in a free society, the least control makes for the biggest happiness. The slightest reflection will demonstrate that there could be considerable misery, not to say plagues and pestilences, if government did not hold an analytical and punitive eye on producers of medicine, drugs, foods, and beverages…A good citizen not only does not object but is happy for the fact that someone more skilled than he determines whether the can of peaches he opens…is free of deleterious ingredients. A worthy member of society who is just as much concerned about mental purity as he is over bodily cleanliness, is grateful that the government that protects him from contact with physical contagion will also save him from association with moral trash…” ******
Hmnn. Moral trash? Musmanno decided cases in the 1950s—the Hallmark case was 1956. THIS IS 2024. What Musmanno called trash you can now read or see inside California’s schools thanks to Gavin Newsom and the California legislature. At the same time, you better not use the wrong pronouns, back the wrong candidate, or question the directives, mandates, and regulations imposed by the government of California. Maybe the next 68 years will free us from today’s censorship just as the last 68 years freed us from the censorship of Musmanno’s era.
It looks as though freedom, your freedom, largely depends on your willingness to assemble to peacefully protest restrictions that self-proclaimed government experts and bureaucrats pushing an agenda might impose on you.
*https://www.politifact.com/article/2007/sep/01/how-much-credit-giuliani-due-fighting-crime/
**For a long list of book burning incidents see the Wikipedia article titled “List of book-burning incidents.”
***https://nypost.com/2024/11/12/us-news/lgbtq-groups-finally-invited-to-march-in-staten-island-st-patricks-day-parade-ending-nyc-events-decades-long-anti-gay-ban/
****Ann Arbor, MI. University of Michigan Press. Two germane cases were Cox v. New Hampshire (1941) and a case regarding the requirement of a person going door-to-door to evangelize in the manner of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Murdock v. Pennsylvania in which “a municipal ordinance which, as construed and applied, requires religious colporteurs (book and other literature peddlers) to pay a license tax as a condition to the pursuit of their activities, is invalid under the Federal Constitution as a denial of freedom of speech, press and religion.” You can see the problem: A community could require a Jehovah’s Witness to pay a tax just for walking around and knocking. (Yeah, some of you are saying, “Hey, I could see that, especially at supper time. And while we’re at it, how about those phone calls?)
*****California Bans Book Bans and Textbook Censorship in Schools
******Carmen. Op. cit., p. 243.
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