Want Freedom?

Xenopax writes "According to this story on the Sacramento Bee Americans are now more willing to throw away their first amendment rights for the false feeling of security than ever before. In fact many believe that the First amendment goes too far with its protection and think we should allow monitoring of religious groups for national security. Also many people believe the media shouldn't be allowed to question the government in times of war. One has to wonder if anyone cares about their constitutional rights any more, or if everyone would be happier living in 1984." The study is conducted by the Freedom Forum every year and is available for download.

Comments

Re:One of my favourite quotes...

[Lemmy Caution]

The United States has not had real conflict in its borders since the mid 19th century - even 9/11 wasn't a real war at home in anyway comparable to anything the rest of the world has had to deal with for most of the 20th century. In light of that fact, it wasn't surprising that a rhetoric of a free society was able to develop. In light of the love of comfort and security that the American populace evinces, I sometimes think that if it faced the sorts of turmoil that Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America confronted, it would be willing to create a society far less free than many of the above in order to defend those comforts. The luxury of freedom apparently ranks below other luxuries.

The Constitution doesn't need amending

[reimero]

One thing I find interesting in all this discussion of rights and freedoms is really how much we assume is constitutionally guaranteed versus what the Constitution actually says. For instance, here is the First Amendment in its entirety:

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.

From the above, it has been inferred that any kind of prayer in public schools is unconstitutional, that putting the 10 Commandments on public property is unconstitutional, that pr0n is legal, that a woman has the right to privacy and, consequently, the right to terminate pregnancy, that public libraries may not filter web sites, and so on and so forth.

The point I'm making is that we have become accustomed to reading an awful lot into that one small amendment. As a student of political science, however, I find it both amusing and disturbing that the first five words of the amendment are the ones most frequently ignored: "Congress shall pass no law..."

Taken literally (and as the Founding Fathers intended!) this means that most of these freedoms we take for granted were never intended to be freedoms at the level they are, but rather issues left to the individual states!

I don't know exactly what that means for us today, but it is food for thought.