This basically proves our thesis...you all ain't liberals any more... and even your elites don't understand your party morphed or returned pre-fascism. (usual name... this is what I have been explaining to you.) your team is not liberal... you are progressing towards facism where elites rule you and everyone else is equally screwed. https://www.breitbart.com/big-gover...hy-liberals-have-flip-flopped-on-free-speech/ In a remarkably honest exposé, the New York Times acknowledged Saturday that “liberals who once championed expansive First Amendment rights are now uneasy about them” ever since conservatives realized they should apply to them as well. The Times cites First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams who noted that whereas the left once led support for First Amendment protections, they are now “at least skeptical and sometimes distraught at the level of First Amendment protection which is being afforded in cases brought by litigants on the right.” The difference between then and now? Many of the ideas currently being protected by free speech rights run contrary to progressive ideology. Over the last 13 years, the Supreme Court “has been far more likely to embrace free-speech arguments concerning conservative speech than liberal speech,” the Times said. One law professor at Georgetown, Louis Michael Seidman, who used to defend free speech now sees his prior position as a mistake. “When I was younger, I had more of the standard liberal view of civil liberties,” Seidman said. “And I’ve gradually changed my mind about it. What I have come to see is that it’s a mistake to think of free speech as an effective means to accomplish a more just society.” Catharine A. MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, goes further still, declaring that free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice because it is now being used to defend ideas she finds distressing. “Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful,” writes MacKinnon, who teaches such courses as “Evolution of Gender Crimes” and “Sex Equality.” Whereas free speech used to be invoked to defend “radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed,” MacKinnon laments, it has now become “a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.” In other words, the left was much quicker than the right to understand the power of free speech protections. In a curious irony, however, most conservatives today would be quick to defend even Ms. MacKinnon’s adolescent name-calling, which compensates for a lack of serious arguments. Speech does not need to be intelligent or compelling to be worthy of protection. In reading through the New York Times piece it becomes abundantly clear that many liberals really never cared about “free speech” as such, but rather sought protection specifically for progressive ideas and behaviors. As soon as conservatives started demanding the same protections for their speech, it no longer seemed like such a good idea. The Times titled its article “How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment.” Perhaps a more accurate title would have been, “How Conservatives Learned from the Left and Started Using Their Own Weapons Against Them.” Or, more simply, “What Goes Around, Comes Around.”
Here is the actual article in the New York Times - brought to us via WRAL. The article basically outlines that all the free speech positions campaigned by liberals in the 1960s and 1970s are campaigned by Republicans today. Today Liberals want to limit free speech and make speech they don't like be silent. How Free Speech Was Weaponized by Conservatives https://www.wral.com/how-free-speech-was-weaponized-by-conservatives/17666809/
nice article butt... Anyone who thinks its a good idea to let govt force faith based pregnancy counseling centers to post abortion information... does not care about liberty and freedom. Same goes with forcing a baker to bake a cake he does not wish to bake just because you prefer the politics of the plaintiff. What gay right was abrogated there? The gay right to force any artist to create something the artist does not wish to create. That was not gay rights... that was govt imposing servitude. The first amendment does not just protect conservative interests and the status quo. it protected all these counter culture groups rights to be counter culture. Now it protects to the rights of the non counter culture to be conservative. That is why the constitution is so great. Its indifferent to the wishes of those in control of govt.
by the way I was happy you posted the full article... the butt was not directed to the poster but some of the ideas in the article.
The left started to see free speech differently after it had consolidated its hold on media, entertainment, big business, universities and government.
from the article: One law professor at Georgetown, Louis Michael Seidman, who used to defend free speech now sees his prior position as a mistake. “When I was younger, I had more of the standard liberal view of civil liberties,” Seidman said. “And I’ve gradually changed my mind about it. What I have come to see is that it’s a mistake to think of free speech as an effective means to accomplish a more just society.” ================================================= Note that that clown is a law professor at Georgetown. Just imagine the damage he does every day. TOTO WE MOST DEFINITELY ARE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This new pre fascism is very scary. Leftists now wish to achieve their goals without freedom of speech and thought. They don't want opposition. They don't want you to have a choice if they tell you to bake a cake for a gay wedding ... you must bake it or go out of business. If you wish to have a faith based pregnancy counseling center you must give women info about fetus killing. if you wish to protest cops by calling them names you will have a hate crime tacked on to your arrest.
The Left is so confused and disorganized these days... What a mess. They are truly caught out in the wilderness it seems. How does one weaponize my first right - freedom of speech? The cowards at the NYT now want to compel speech. How pathetic.