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.
Sound familiar? It should. I'm almost sure that you had to read it sometime during your elementary/middle/high school years.
It seems straight forward enough, doesn't it? Let's see: Religion, check; Assemble, check; petition, sure. But what about this speech thing? Well, obviously our congressmen feel that the internet doesn't count as speech.
<TIRADE>
I'll just start this off with something to get my site banned, after all,
Michaelangelo was a sick puppy.
After all, the internet has the ability to be far more efficent than speech. I don't know if the following statement is folklore or truth, but I've heard that net-surfers got wind of the Soviet Union's collapse before the Associated Press did.
Do you want the government telling you what you can say over the phone? Well, the Bill of Rights certainly doesn't say anything about your right for freedom of phone use, does it? The spirit of the Bill of Rights, in my humble opinion, is that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of COMMUNICATION and IDEAS. Back when it was penned, speech and press were just about the only forms of communication. Now we obviously have a lot more: Phones, faxes, e-mail, web-pages, etc.
I feel that the internet provides a valuable forum for the use the distribution of ideas, mayhaps moreso than the printed word. One book can only be read by one person at a time, but a single web page can be read by thousands simultaneously! This represents, to me, an evolution in communication, and mayhaps the gateway to a more informed society at large. To arbitrarily say that someone's idea of art is perverse, or that someone's politics are too subversive, and then deny this person expression of his ideas smacks of a government that could, in time, bring our society into an Orwellian nightmare.
To deny society a chance to evolve, to squash new ideas, to repress expression and creativity is everything the Bill of Rights is against, and everything the Internet, left free, could help us rise above.
</TIRADE>
Whew. This ramble was composed by Chuck Smith, proprietor of Smythe's Demesne.
