In case you understandably have trouble reading the above hand-written version:
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.
— First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
I just thought you might want to have that handy as I raise the following topics. I put them there in case you’re inclined to get up on a high horse to do battle with “censors,” or to assume unwarranted power to shut somebody up, so you can glance and see what the Constitution actually does and does not protect before you mount up.
Anyway, since his good piece that I praised a couple of days back, I’ve kept an eye out for columns and such written by the NYT’s David French. Or maybe an ear out, as I listened to both of these while walking today:
I admit that I haven’t had a lot of interest in, or tendency to opine about, TikTok during these years in which so many have hollered back and forth on the subject. The medium leaves me cold. I am passionately opposed to video presented vertically, in profile mode (we can discuss that later), so I’m unlikely ever to look at it.
But of course, what I think (or what anyone else thinks) of the app’s content is neither here nor there with regard to the case currently before the Supreme Court. Mr. French makes that case quite ably, and correctly, early in what he says at that first link:
But the reason why, even though I am a lifelong free speech advocate, I support the ban on TikTok, this particular law, is because the issue here really isn’t about the content of the speech on TikTok. Everything that’s on TikTok, you could put on Instagram, and it would be fine. Facebook, it would be fine. Maybe not fine from the standpoint of it being worthwhile content. There’s a lot of trash on TikTok. But constitutionally fine.
The issue here is control. Can we allow a social media company that the government believes to be under the direct control of the People’s Republic of China to have that kind of access to American data and to the American public square? And that’s the real issue, in my view. Who controls TikTok is of enormous consequence. And the Chinese government does not have a constitutional right to operate in the American public square. And in fact, there’s a lot of potential dangers and problems if we allow China to have that continued access…
In the rest of the piece, he backs up those statements quite ably. It’s not about content. And moreover, it’s not about whether you or any other American citizen is allowed to post whatever sort of video you like on the Web. You have an enormous multitude of free ways of doing that, starting with, for instance, YouTube. That site will even allow you to post vertically, blast the louts.
Of course, unless you’re among the 170 million or so Americans who delight in TikTok, you may not be passionate about that one. But you might want to express yourself — in a calm and civil manner, which is all that is allowed here — on the second topic. Writes French:
When does freedom for adults become cruelty to children?
The Supreme Court will hear arguments this week in a case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, that raises exactly that question. The Free Speech Coalition (a pornography industry trade association) is challenging a 2023 Texas law that requires sites offering pornographic material to “use reasonable age verification methods” to check whether a user is at least 18….
At first glance, the law is simple common sense. As Texas noted, all 50 states bar minors from purchasing pornography. Offline, identification requirements are common. Showing a driver’s license to enter a strip club is routine. Zoning restrictions can push pornographic establishments out of neighborhoods and away from schools and other places where kids congregate.
Online, though, it is the Wild West. Children have easy access to graphic and hard-core pornography. There’s a certain difficulty in writing about this issue — merely describing what children see online can be too much for adults reading family newspapers to tolerate…
Since I’ve spent half my life as an editor at some of those fussy “family newspapers,” I also have a rule against unnecessary use of profanity here on the blog. But I don’t guess I have to actually type the letters to tell you where you can stick your “right” to porn when such unrestricted availability endangers children.
Arguments to the contrary are offensively pathetic. I hope the link I gave you works for you, because French takes such arguments apart rather effectively — but I’ve already stretched the bounds of “Fair Use” in what I’ve quoted so far. I’ll just give you a few links to studies on the effects of exposure to pornography on kids. If you find those effects acceptable, then I will simply tell you that I strongly disagree.
Of course, we could argue all day about the Constitutional angle. Or you could. I’ve spent way too much of my life listening to people make ridiculous claims regarding the scope of the First Amendment.
I’ll leave you with this: If you had told the Framers that they were guaranteeing the right to expose American children to videos showing… well, one more quote from the column:
As one teenager wrote in The Free Press in 2023, in fourth grade she was exposed to “simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism and unthinkable physical violence.”…
… those Framers might have moved quickly to limit your freedom by having you locked up in one of their era’s particularly unpleasant institutions for the insane. At the very least, they’d have moved away from you there on the Group W bench.
And if you had insisted to them that their work said Congress may make no law barring a Chinese company from doing business in the United States when that business is deemed a threat to national security, they’d have wondered what had gotten into the water in our troubled 21st century.
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It’s interesting — and often problematic — the way people tend to interpret the Amendment not according to what it says, but according to what they would like it to say.
For instance, take the first part of of it. It does not say there is to be a “wall of separation” between church and state. That’s just a view Thomas Jefferson expressed in a letter in 1802. And he wasn’t even present when the Constitution was being put together, although he had his boy Madison playing a key role.
No, what that portion of the Amendment does is forbid Congress from creating an Established Church — meaning, for instance, you could not be forced to pay tithes to such a specified church — and from preventing you from worshipping as you chose. It’s a fine Amendment, taking us far into a new era of religious tolerance. But there’s no impermeable wall between faith and the public sphere…