From Andrew Klavan at The American Mind:
Whether or not Donald Trump wins his suit against the big tech firms that censor him, he is right in principle. No matter the difficulties, paradoxes, and technicalities, these companies’ assaults on free expression have to be stopped by law.
These outfits are not local cake makers who mustn’t be forced to celebrate what they find unholy. They are multi-national outfits with the wealth and power of sovereign states. When Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube act in concert to deny access to the President of the United States, or when a functioning monopoly like Amazon pulls a book for political reasons—as it did with When Harry Became Sally, Ryan T. Anderson’s thoughtful look at transgenderism—they are making it next to impossible for certain ideas and opinions to be widely expressed and known. That is a danger to our right to free speech.
And that right has to be protected by the government because it is given to us by God.
This is not, in other words, a First Amendment issue. The First Amendment protects our free speech from the government. But the government is still responsible for protecting those rights from other threats as well. It says so in the Declaration of Independence.
It was Abraham Lincoln who most fully understood and expressed the fact that, while our Constitution is the law of the land, the “sacred principles” in the Declaration of Independence—“that immortal emblem of Humanity”—give the Constitution its philosophy and its purpose. Governments, the Declaration proclaims, “are instituted among men” to secure the rights endowed in mankind by their Creator.
If this is so, then whether the threat to our God-given rights comes from private entities or from government itself, government is responsible for making those rights secure from that threat.
Recently, on my Daily Wire podcast, I made this argument to Alan Dershowitz, an expert in constitutional law. This was part of his response: “I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but Abraham Lincoln was wrong… I don’t think you can derive rights from God because there are too many gods, there are too many interpreters of God, there are too many ways in which God has been misused.”
With all respect to Mr. Dershowitz, I side with Mr. Lincoln. (Read more.)
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2 comments:
I agree in part but I also am sick of and outraged that freedom of speech should be interpreted as a freedom to lie and say what ever suits my agendas . That is just a degradation of Voltaire's ideas on the right to freedom of speech and that is what Trump and way too many politicians are engaging in .It leads to a growing cynicism in the public discourse and a completes breakdown in people trust of any thing the read . That is VERY dangerous. as we are seeing today .
Well said!
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