The greatest threat to protections for our freedom may be people's fear that people who disagree with them are exercising their rights.By J.D. Tuccille
https://reason.com/2019/12/15/its-bill-of-rights-day-do-americans-still-care/Happy Bill of Rights Day! For what it's worth, the Third Amendment is still in pretty good shape—at least, the last soldier to crash on my sofa was a friend sleeping off a post-divorce binge. It's a mixed bag for the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights, though, with protections for some important freedoms facing serious incursions. What's most disturbing is that the threat comes not just from the usual suspects in government, but from the public at large . . .
. . . Legislators from both major parties want to strip away protections for online speech. And President Trump insists that "free speech is not when you see something good and then you purposely write bad, to me that's very dangerous speech."
But these are government officials. We assume that they're nasty creatures who will always push against restraints on exercising the power that attracted them to their chosen careers. Against their worst efforts the public can supposedly count on the admittedly uncertain, but often helpful, protections of the Bill of Rights to protect their rights from government violation.
What happens, though, when the public itself becomes iffy about personal freedom?
. . . The Bill of Rights can withstand a hostile political class if it's supported by a culture that genuinely wants to be shielded from the depredations of government officials. If, instead, people come to see the Bill of Rights as a barrier to their efforts to harm their opponents, its component amendments will be reinterpreted or overturned so that they don't get in the way of political warriors sticking it to each other . . .
------------------------------------------------------------
Among other things, I plan to spend part of my Sunday listening to this live radio broadcast from today's date in 1941, whose author/director was finishing the script when, aboard a train along the west coast, he received the news of Pearl Harbour . . .
Columbia Workshop, "We Hold These Truths" (On the anniversary of the Bill of Rights), CBS, 15 December 1941--EA.
