It seems that Americans in the 21st Century don't understand Free Speech. Group displaying hateful signs seen on Interstate 75 overpass near Evendale
The people were dressed in all-black and were spotted near I-75 and Vision Way early on Friday afternoon.
The banners were displayed around the overpass, looking down onto I-75. Multiple images of swastikas were seen on the banners.
There is clear precedent from 1949. Terminiello v. City of Chicago ruled that you can't outlaw speech you don't like, not even speech that "stirs the public to anger." This was all reinforced in 1977 when the Illinois Nazi party tried to hold a march in Skokie, Illinois, a town in suburban Chicago, a town home to many Holocaust survivors.
That whole episode (I was living in suburban Chicago in 1977) is why the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers took so much joy in roasting Illinois Nazis.
Evendale police released a statement on the incident, saying in part "the protest was occurring on sidewalks designed for pedestrian travel. The protest, while very offensive, was not unlawful. The protest was short lived in duration. The protestors left the area on their own. No further action was taken by the Evendale Police Department."
Evendale, Ohio is a suburb of Cincinnati, being about 10 miles north of downtown.
If someone says something that you disagree with, mock them, or explain, rationally, why they are wrong. Stamping your feet, and wailing is not productive, not even if they are being truly offensive. Doing what the Left usually does - just calling them racist, homophobic, whatever - doesn't really work in the long run, even if it is true.
Hat tip to Clayton Cramer: Free Speech Can Be Nasty and Ugly
That is why the First Amendment protects it.
People don't like nasty. Too bad.
To paraphrase Jefferson about religion. "Nasty ideas neither break my leg, nor pick my pocket." If your heritage is so weak that you need to arrest them, you are weak indeed.
You are free to say what you want. You also have to accept when others call you out on what you say. That is how it works.
ReplyDeleteThat is not how a lot of Gen Z views the world. They want upfront censorship.
DeleteAnd not just Gen Z. Look at the UK. They are abandoning free speech all together. Tell a joke - go to jail. Criticize Islam - go to jail.
Closer to home there is the Gina Carano lawsuit against Disney. They fired her for being a conservative, for daring to not toe the line of the far left progressives. They did that even though it is against the law in California - a law put in decades ago to protect the progressives from being fired by conservative studios.
And also closer to home... for the past 4 years if you said anything like "We need to secure the borders because of crime, terror, and fentanyl," you were immediately shouted down as racist and xenophobic. Why was being worries about excess fentanyl deaths racist? Because shut up and think what we tell you to think, bigot, that's why.
DeleteZendo Deb: Agree, but they need to learn.
ReplyDelete