Date: Sat, 11 Feb 1995 01:41:09 -0600 To: cypherpunks@toad.com From: dls@mcs.com (David Sallach)
"Free" speech has always been a balancing act. The founders certainly didn't intend to provide "free" speech for blacks and women.
The Founders created a larger space for free speech than had ever existed. Slaves were deprived of many freedoms including speech, of course, but women and free blacks were included in the Bill of Rights and exercised free speech, frequently compellingly.
And were frequently thrown in jail for their pains - note especially the experiences of the early feminists [anachronistic label alert]. And let us not forget what happened to the Mormons ...
Check out Frederick Douglass' practicing oration while still a slave, and then winning his freedom to become one of the greatest abolitionist orators. Consider the appreciation of diversity of thought and speech manifested by Jefferson, Lincoln and many other American political leaders.
And Douglass spent a good portion of his life as a refugee in a protected enclave [Boston] where he had powerful friends to keep him from being arrested. I'm not dissing the Founders, or the Bill of Rights -- just the simplified pap their invocation in most discourse has become. I was trained in high school as a scientist, and in college as an historian, and in both instances to value the messy contingent realities over the tempting simplicities of ideology and theory. And there are few contingent realities messier than the law ...
. . . "They" have never liked "free" speech ... :-(
Invoking poitically 'correct' stereotypes does not strengthen your argument.
David Sallach
Irony-impaired, are we? There's a Polish word, used by most of the populace after the 1979 coup to refer to the army and apparat, that is usually translated as "them." I [probably incorrectly] recall it as "Oni" -- would you prefer it? My own first encounter with the term "politically [in]correct" was among 70's feminists, who used it ironically, to tell people they needed a vacation/to get laid/to get a grip. Would that Newt used it that way ... =================================== Rich Dutcher, San Francisco Greens P.O. Box 77005, San Francisco, California 94107 USA "That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves." Kim Stanley Robinson, "Green Mars" Greens, of course, only enslave plants - so weed-whackers work better than cops ... ====================================