Practicing My First Amendment Rights by Writing about My First Amendment Rights

It’s been a bad week to be the First Amendment.

This week, legality won a huge victory over humanity in the name of free speech. In an 8-1 vote (Alito was the only dissenter) the Supreme Court deemed the Westboro Church’s military funeral protests constitutional because of the First Amendment.

Considering my love affair with language, it makes sense that the First Amendment has always been my favorite amendment. But my interests aren’t solely linguistic. I love the First Amendment because it’s the most idealistic amendment. It gives us the right to speak our minds, to discuss our government and its leaders critically, loudly, and passionately without fear. The First Amendment gives us the power to use our own discretion when it comes to our speech; it seems to assume that when left to our own devices, people will usually make intelligent and judicious decisions with language. I’m sure that other amendments (especially the Second Amendment) make fun of Number One because of his idealism and his naïve belief that most people will use the powers of free speech and petition for good. Right now, The Right to Bear Arms is probably shaking his head at the First Amendment and saying something like, “I told you so. You should probably lower your expectations.” I’m guessing because the First Amendment gives everyone the benefit of the doubt, it’s feeling pretty taken advantage of right now.

James Madison wrote The Bill of Rights in the late 1780s after many of the Founding Fathers and other prominent political figures of the time expressed concern that The Constitution gave the government too much power. After breaking away from a monarchy through a bloody revolution, it makes sense that many of these men (who could have been hanged 15 years earlier for the things they said about King George III) had a need to assert their rights as citizens. But I doubt that James Madison every imagined that his document would be used to defend a group of religious extremists who were tormenting the families of soldiers killed during the battle.

This makes me wonder that if James Madison sat down to compose The Bill of Rights today, what would his views on the freedom of speech be?

In Madison’s world, publishing and distributing a thought, controversial or not, took a lot of time and effort. The printing presses (before 1790) could only make about 300 to 500 copies a day, and the construction of the original copy was a very laborious and time-consuming process. Today, newspapers can be printed at an approximate rate of 160,000 per hour. And that’s leaving out online publications that can reach billions of readers at any time. In Madison’s day, fewer people were exercising their right to free speech in any type of public forum and the process they had to go through to publish anything was slower. A slower process meant that most early Americans were naturally more reflective with their thoughts and words because getting them from brain to paper and then to world took more time and therefore gave them more chances to second-guess and edit what they were saying. Would James Madison have argued for the same rights if he had spent a few days reading through the comments underneath ANY youtube video? (How people are prompted to hurl racial slurs at one another after watching a video of a kitten riding atop a Roomba vacuum, I’m not entirely sure). Thanks to the internet, everyone is allowed to publish themselves and publically practice their first amendment rights, and since these publications happen instantaneously, they are oftentimes reactive, hateful, and cruel.

After the Supreme Court made such a tough decision this week in order to protect our right to speak our minds (no matter how perverse and hateful they may be) it makes me want to reconsider what is “publishable.” I have countless opportunities through Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Blogspot, YouTube, comments under all news articles, forums, etc to practice my First Amendment Rights on a daily basis. But I want to make sure I’m treating my First Amendment Rights with all the respect that they deserve. Just like some things don’t need to be said, some things also don’t need to be posted on the Internet.

All I’m saying is that if the Supreme Court is going to rule the Westboro Church’s protests constitutional in order to protect the rest of America’s First Amendment Rights, then we had better start saying something important and stop wasting our rights on Charlie Sheen’s bi-winning disorder, the contents of Snooki’s bump (guilty), and how Bieber is too bird-chested to be dating that Selena chick. If we had to spell that mess out on a Gutenberg printing press, we’d probably choose our words more carefully. And sometimes, we just wouldn’t say anything at all…