The Least Popular Amendment Beyond Prohibition: The First Amendment

               

There's battle lines being drawn

Nobody's right if everybody's wrong

Young people speaking' their minds

Getting so much resistance from behind

Lyrics to “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield 1967

We’ve struggled with free speech since the First Amendment, the cornerstone of our Bill of Rights, was passed in 1789. While post-WWII Europe had no trouble banning Nazi memorabilia, lacking such a constitutional mandate, we have had very mixed results. We’ve struggled with newspapers publishing leaked state secrets, pornography (hi, Lenny Bruce and Larry Flynt) and most recently hate speech, police violently controlling public protests (and violent confrontation between opposing groups) and most troubling of all, political campaign speech encouraging or inciting violence. Under the guise of fighting a “culture war” to support perceived traditional American values, we’ve crushed the plain meaning of the First Amendment to read:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment OF ANY RELIGION BUT MY religion, or prohibiting the MY free exercise thereof; or abridging MY freedom of speech, or of MY CHOSEN press; or MY right peaceably to assemble, and MY right to petition the Government for a redress of MY grievances.

Congress is entertaining the ban of TikTok, which the President has said he would sign if a bill reached his desk, because of perceived national security dangers of a social media site owned in significant part by China. All over red America, we are watching book bans in public schools, universities and libraries, tomes that sat in these institutions without objection for decades. Statutes are flying out of red state legislatures that are clearly evangelical Christian “mandates” that purport to exercise rather personal “religious values” that they believe should control everybody.

This is hardly a rightwing only movement. Universities have canceled speaking engagements for populist and rightwing speakers, as progressives wish to control who may speak to students. They are mandating changes in linguistic references to individuals, telling us which pronouns we must use in our everyday speech. “Politically correct” is another phrase for adopting the choices of those who wish to censor or control us. And yet throughout these changes, we have entered a period where common civility no longer matters. Many, communicating under the anonymity of social media, threaten, describe others in horrible ways, and seek to impose their beliefs as legal requirements on the rest of us… by force of firearms if necessary.

Discrimination is now legal for those with “legitimate” religious beliefs against individual personal practices and preferences, despite the fact that the First Amendment was our Forefathers’ protection of so many who fled Europe in search of freedom to be themselves, worship as they pleased and to build a New World in their image. “My way or the highway” is new normal to so many.

Even as the First Amendment proscribes the “establishment” of a state religion, there are more than a few members of Congress who maintain that it is necessary for Congress to establish Christianity as our official national religion. So much for Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others who make up sizeable demographics in our land… or those who have no religious preference or do not believe in a higher being. But more than that, they believe that their interpretation of Christian values should trump our Constitution and our laws. They are even fighting to replace our precious democracy with a Christian-approved dictatorship.

The United States went to war several times in our history to protect our freedoms, against villainous dictators, to leave all of us with the legacy of freedom we have today. WWII took the lives of many of our soldiers in order to protect individual freedoms that we enjoy today, even as there are larger swaths of us now trying to control every aspect of our lives. Did those soldiers die in vain? There were American Nazis before WII, a movement that died when Pearl Harbor was bombed. But Nazi rhetoric has returned, and there is a significant movement to impose uniform minority values as a mandate for everyone. Are our WWII soldiers rolling in their graves?

Today, many politicians hide behind a twisted view of the First Amendment to allow them to call their followers to arms, to ignore and push against “one person, one vote” and to place ordinary government workers doing their jobs under threat of death… without any responsibility for the obvious consequences. This is not my country. These are not the values of tolerance and respect I grew up with as an American… even as a Christian. But this is the future of America if we do not stand as tall as those from our history who opposed such vitriolic autocracies. And gave their lives for us!

I’m Peter Dekom, and too many major political figures are falsely yelling “Fire” in the crowded theater of our democracy.