The
First Amendment to the US Constitution:
Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or the
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The
Founders understood that Free Speech was Critical to Freedom.
They
had lived under the thumb of a Monarch who limited Free Speech
As ALL
Dictators do.
Dictators
will Tolerate No Opposition.
The
Founders also understood that a Free Nation could not be maintained
Except
that the people be a Moral People before God and His Word.
John
Adams in
a speech to the military in 1798 warned his fellow countrymen
stating, "We have no government armed with power capable of
contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . .
. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It
is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John
Adams is
a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and
our second President.
There
in lies the problem we see today,
America
is No longer a Moral People.
America
is a Nation in Rebellion Against God and His Word.
The
following is a background of the First Amendment from Wikipedia:
First Amendment
The First
Amendment to the United States Constitution codifies
the freedom of speech as a constitutional
right.
The Amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791. The Amendment states:
- Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Although
the text of the Amendment prohibits only the United
States Congress from
enacting laws that abridge the freedom of speech, the Supreme Court
held in Gitlow
v. New York (1925)
that under the incorporation
doctrine,
the Due
Process Clause of
the Fourteenth
Amendment prohibits state
legislatures from
enacting such laws.
Early history
England
During colonial
times,
English speech regulations were rather restrictive. The English
criminal common law of seditious
libel made
criticizing the government a crime. Chief Justink Hut, writing in
1704–1705, explained the apparent need for the prohibition or no
government can subsist. For it is very necessary for all governments
that the people should have a good opinion of it. The objective truth
of a statement in violation of the libel law was not a defense.
Until 1694
England had an elaborate system of licensing; no publication was
allowed without the accompaniment of the government-granted license.
Colonies
The
colonies originally had different views on the protection of free
speech. During English colonialism in America, there were fewer
prosecutions for seditious libel than England, but other controls
over dissident speech existed.
The
most stringent controls on speech in the colonial period were
controls that outlawed or otherwise censored speech that was
considered blasphemous in
a religious sense. A 1646 Massachusetts law, for example, punished
persons who denied the immortality of the soul. In 1612,
a Virginia governor
declared the death penalty for a person that denied the Trinity under
Virginia's Laws
Divine, Moral and Martial,
which also outlawed blasphemy, speaking badly of ministers and
royalty, and "disgraceful words".[2]
More
recent scholarship, focusing on seditious speech in the 17th-century
colonies (when there was no press), has shown that from 1607 to 1700
the colonists' freedom of speech expanded dramatically, laying a
foundation for the political dissent that flowered among the
Revolutionary generation.[3]
The
trial of John
Peter Zenger in
1735 was a seditious libel prosecution for Zenger's publication of
criticisms of the Governor of New York, William
Cosby. Andrew
Hamilton represented
Zenger and argued that truth should be a defense to the crime of
seditious libel, but the court rejected this argument. Hamilton
persuaded the jury, however, to disregard the law and to acquit
Zenger. The case is considered a victory for freedom of speech as
well as a prime example of jury
nullification.
The case marked the beginning of a trend of greater acceptance and
tolerance of free speech.
First Amendment ratification
In
the 1780s after the American
Revolutionary War,
debate over the adoption of a new Constitution resulted in a division
between Federalists,
such as Alexander
Hamilton who
favored a strong federal government, and Anti-Federalists,
such as Thomas
Jeffersonand Patrick
Henry who
favored a weaker federal government.
During
and after the Constitution ratification process, Anti-Federalists and
state legislatures expressed concern that the new Constitution placed
too much emphasis on the power of the federal government. The
drafting and eventual adoption of the Bill
of Rights,
including the First
Amendment,
was, in large part, a result of these concerns, as the Bill of Rights
limited the power of the federal government.
Alien and Sedition Acts
Main
article: Alien
and Sedition Acts
In
1798, Congress, which contained several of the ratifiers of the First
Amendment at the time, adopted the Alien
and Sedition Acts.
The laws prohibited the publication of "false, scandalous, and
malicious writings against the government of the United States, or
either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President
of the United States, with intent to defame...or to bring them...into
contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them...hatred of the good
people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United
States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing
or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the
President of the United States".
The
law did allow truth as a defense and required proof of malicious
intent. The 1798 Act nevertheless made ascertainment of the intent of
the framers regarding the First Amendment somewhat difficult, as some
of the members of Congress that supported the adoption of the First
Amendment also voted to adopt the 1798 Act. The Federalists under
President John
Adams aggressively
used the law against their rivals, the Democratic-Republicans.
The Alien and Sedition Acts were a major political issue in the 1800
election,
and after he was elected President, Thomas Jefferson pardoned those
who had been convicted under the Act. The Act expired and the Supreme
Court never
ruled on its constitutionality.
In New
York Times v. Sullivan,
the Court declared "Although the Sedition Act was never tested
in this Court, the attack upon its validity has carried the day in
the court of history." 376 U.S. 254, 276 (1964).
Modern view
As
a result of the jurisprudence of the Warren
Court in
the mid-to-late 20th century, the Court has moved towards a baseline
default rule under which freedom of speech is generally presumed to
be protected, unless a specific exception applies. Therefore, apart
from certain narrow exceptions, the government normally cannot
regulate the content of
speech. In 1971, in Cohen
v. California,
Justice John
Marshall Harlan II,
citing Whitney
v. California,
emphasized that the First
Amendment operates
to protect the inviolability of"a marketplace
of ideas",
while Associate Justice Thurgood
Marshall cogently
explained in 1972 that:
[A]bove all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content. [Citations.] To permit the continued building of our politics and culture, and to assure self-fulfillment for each individual, our people are guaranteed the right to express any thought, free from government censorship. The essence of this forbidden censorship is content control. Any restriction on expressive activity because of its content would completely undercut the 'profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.' [Citation.][4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_United_States
Today,
the godless, Socialist, Secular Humanists
Are
attempting to Force their godless Religion on the American People.
They
want to Curtail Free Speech
That
speaks against that which is against God and His Word.
If
this continues, Soon, a person will not be able
To
speak against Homosexuality or Same-Sex Marriage,
Or
speak against Abortion Murder.
No comments:
Post a Comment