Sunday, March 4, 2012

Rush To Judgement

Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot. Anyone with common sense and the tiniest portion of decency knows this; he's a loudmouth jackass who pretends to serve his audience when he's just serving himself and lining his pockets with advertisers' money.
   Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I'm about to defend him.
   More accurately, I'm going to defend the Constitutional principle that allows blowhard losers like Rush Limbaugh to have his say, no matter how stupid what he says is. The First Amendment to the US Constitution.
   It's easy to defend someone's right to speak freely when you agree with them. Somebody says they love puppies? Who doesn't? Someone says they wish the government wouldn't tax them so much? We all wish that. Someone says Americans should eat more vegetables and less sugar? Well, duh, of course we should, we're all fat bastards.
   When we don't agree with what someone says, though, our hackles go up. 'They shouldn't be allowed to say that...' But the fact of the matter is that the First Amendment was created to protect speech we don't agree with. You may not like hearing a sweating, drug-addicted walrus call a young woman a slut just because she advocates birth control, but that walrus has as much a right to say terrible things as you do. He just has a larger audience.
   There are limits to free speech, of course. The famous 'fire in a crowded theater' limitation, for example. You can't incite murder, you can't libel someone, you can't start a fight, your words can't create a clear and present danger to the community. Aside from that, you can say any damn fool thing you want. I can too. And that's the beauty of the First Amendment. It applies to all of us.
   It is in the speech that we find most objectionable that we also find the greatest application of the First Amendment. It is the price of liberty that we must endure listening to things we would rather not, and indeed that we must celebrate the fact that someone said those things, because the moment we restrict free speech only to those things we agree with we're stumbling down a slippery slope to State censorship of every idea. Our openness makes our society great, and with great openness comes great responsibility.
   So let's raise a glass to Rush Limbaugh, the big fat idiot. His continued exercise of his First Amendment rights reminds us all that we need to be diligent in exercising our own liberties. And raise the glass to Larry Flynt, and to Pat Robertson, and even to those vile, sorry excuses of human beings in the Westboro Baptist Church. It's in protecting the speech we find most reprehensible that we prove we're worthy of the same freedom ourselves.