Former V.P. Joe Biden talks about free speech and the First Amendment during a conference at the University of Delaware.
Posts Tagged ‘free speech’
Repeal the First?
December 20, 2015Here’s a clip making the rounds this week.
I usually take this kind of thing with many grains of salt. After all, you can talk strangers into signing almost any petition in the right circumstances. They’ll even sign a petition to ban water.
But the reasons this one struck me were, first, that I’d hoped that Yale students would know what rights the First Amendment protects — one of those being the right to petition government for redress of grievances. (Pretty heavy irony, idn’t it?)
And second, what leads to this nonsense? People with the I’m-not-responsible-if-you-offend-me attitude and their demands for trivial trigger warnings and for safe spaces.
Since we’re talking about being offended, what offends me is the attitude that I should give a damn about your opinion of what I say. Samuel Johnson said it better: Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it.
So I’ll do another thing I don’t usually do. Here’s a little visual snark about this topic that I also came across this week.
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No Truce With Kings 