"Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the fee 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"...
-- founding fathers, First Amendment to the United States Constitution 1789
"... unless you disagree with me".
-- addendum to the First Amendment apparently added some time since then when we were not looking.
.............................................................................
We apparently are now allowing speech of all kind to exist, as long as we agree with it, or as long as it achieves something that we agree with, or are at least lead to believe we agree with, the hell with the real intent of the founding fathers and the Constitution. To this end, we now have established:
1. Corporations donating piles of money to influence the outcome of elections is protected free speech.
Last time I looked, a corporation was a piece of paper, or more accurately, a binder or collection of paper put together, signed, notarized and filed with the office of the Secretary of State in the state where it was organized. So according to the Supreme Court, pieces of paper have the right of freedom of speech and the right, due to inordinate sums of money amassed in the name of those pieces of paper, to influence the outcome of elections.
Corporations are people? Well, maybe the life of a corporation does not exist without people, but corporate personhood? All you need to do to figure out whether or not a corporation is a person is to use your own common sense and the thoughts in your own mind in how you refer to a corporation. When you think of your brother, and refer to him in the third person, you generally refer to "him". When you think of your sister, and refer to her in the third person, you generally refer to "her". When you think of Monsanto, G.E., Koch Brothers Industries, etc., if you are referring to the corporation in the singular, third "person", you generally refer to "It". Aside from the Addams Family, have you ever seriously referred to anyone as "It"?
Soooooo.... no. Corporations are not people. We do not refer to people as "It".
If that does not grab you, how about --
Corporations have people who work under a corporate banner or who actually own the corporation, and yes, people do own corporations. People do not own other people, at least supposedly not anymore in this country since the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, notwithstanding some questioning of this principle by some people to the contrary.
There is no question that the actual people who own or who work for corporations are people and have rights. Nobody questions that these people have the right to speak out and to donate to causes they believe in. They just need to do it in their own names and not hide behind the piece of paper they have created which now allows them to do so.
By declaring corporations are people and have the rights of people, they have cheapened the rights of real people, because most of us do not have the resources to fight the resources amassed by those who own the corporations.
And in this respect, they have managed to kill off one of the protections of the First Amendment.
2. It is now possible, in the name of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, to outwardly discriminate against another group of people as long as you can claim a sincerely held religious belief against those people.
If nothing else, this one shows that the white supremacists of Mississippi, Alabama, etc in the 1960's had really lousy lawyers. All they needed to do to perpetuate Jim Crow and the KKK was to claim they were all doing it in the name of their god and their "sincerely held religious conviction" that everyone of them was better than the best colored person. Who knew?
Nowhere else has existence of the addendum to the First Amendment become more crystal clear than here, where it is now possible for a baker in Colorado to violate every conceivable right a gay person has, and more than likely the Commerce Clause of the Constitution as well (you lawyers out there will know what I am talking about. Just think in terms of Ollie's Barbeque in Alabama and their sincerely held beliefs that they should not have to serve black folks in the 1960s and where that argument got them See the 1964 Supreme Court case of Katzenbach v. McClung for non-lawyers and those lawyers like me who got bored in class and were not paying attention). This is also known as outright and unashamed bigotry in the name of "sincerely held religious belief", and cheered on by a large segment of the population, most of whom are not of the same exact religion, but do hold the same exact sincerely held bigoted beliefs.
...and the addendum to the First Amendment comes shining through when a few weeks later, a restaurant in Virginia, exercising the same argument as the baker in Colorado, refuses to serve a presidential press secretary, whose political speech they sincerely disagree with, and those who whooped and hollered in celebration with the baker now scream in indignation against the restaurant.
And then there is this...
I have seen memes on line over the past day or two, with folks on the right posting the phone number and the address of the restaurant that refused to serve the presidential press secretary, which frankly, is no more responsible than posting the phone number and address of the baker in Colorado. I am assuming these folks are not looking to encourage people to make a reservation. I am assuming they are hoping people will go there and picket or try to close the restaurant down. I am also assuming that some of the people who go there will try to take matters into their own hands by bringing their second amendment protected products with them, just as that idiot did by bringing his weapon to Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria to free the child slaves being held there by the Clintons.
Because they, or in the case of the pizzeria, some unknown somebody, disagreed with them. So, apparently, it now okay to yell "fire" in a crowded theater, as long as the theater is owned by somebody you disagree with, and as long as you have a sincerely held religious belief.
So, in this respect, this part of the First Amendment has also now been killed off.
3. You can deny basic health benefits to your employees due to that same sincerely held religious belief.
There is no need to repeat all of the above. I would note, however, that the good folks who fought Obamacare to the United States Supreme Court and won the right not to offer contraceptive care to their employees have continued to fight against the remainder of Obamacare, provisions that have nothing to do with contraceptive care or abortion. So one is left to wonder if they are simply opposing Obamacare because they do not want to spend the money on healthcare for their employees at all.
So once again, the freedom of religion aspect of the First Amendment has been made a mockery of, and for all practical purposes is dead.
4. You can do whatever you want to whomever you want, as long as you have a bully pulpit, the willing assistance of at least one media outlet, and the willingness of half the government to look the other way in order to convince those who want to be convinced that all the news reported about what you do is fake.
You can re-establish internment camps. Internment camps? Why stop there? We need a good concentration camp or two. We have not had the equivalent of them around here in ages. Building them would be a snap, probably easier than building the wall Mexico is going to pay for. Heck, Heart Mountain in Wyoming still has a couple of structures standing, and is surrounded by the same empty fields that were there when the place was first built. There are even a couple of good lumber yards right down the road, and the railroad that ran past the entrance in the good old days is still there. They even built a museum there I am sure can be converted into office space to run the place. The good folks around the area have already proved they can get by just fine with a bunch of Japanese people confined there. I cannot imagine they could not extend the same hospitality and generosity of spirit to a few (thousand) Hispanic kids or, in the alternative, to their parents.
And those of us who protest the return of internment or concentration camps and the rise of this true American Carnage? How un-American! How dare we speak out against fearless leader!! WE ought to be locked up!!!
So... a requiem for the first amendment and, in kind, for ourselves:
Multem dignitatis.
Adeo acta pro hominibus.
Tam pro honestate possit obtinere.
Vivat rex.
Translation:
So much for dignity.
So much for humanity.
So much for decency.
Long live the king.
