Sunday, September 23, 2007

Two Reptiles and Adolph Hitler

Which of these is true?
A man in Los Angeles was charged with smuggling three valuable, endangered iguanas into the U.S. inside his prosthetic leg.
A man in Oregon put his pet diamondback rattlesnake in his mouth; it promptly bit him and shot enough venom in him to kill a dozen people. Doctors saved his life.
A federal judge in Newark overruled the Bayonne school board and said two students could wear buttons featuring a picture of the Hitler Youth to protest a school uniform policy.
Actually, they’re all true.
But can you imagine kids wearing Hitler Youth buttons?
I’d not only have banned the buttons but assigned the historically-challenged kids to watch all 15 hours of Ken Burns’ documentary “The War.”
It covers World War II, started by the Nazi leader and German dictator. More than 50 million Europeans died. Hitler did his best to eliminate the Jewish race from the face of the earth.
To many, Hitler was and will always be the personification of evil.
But U.S. District Judge Joseph A. Greenaway Jr., citing a 1969 case in Iowa in which students were permitted to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam war, ruled for the Hitler Youth buttons as freedom of expression under the First Amendment.
A black armband opposing a war used to justify buttons showing the young followers and soon-to-be soldiers of Adolph Hitler. That seems like a stretch to me.

1 Comments:

At September 24, 2007 at 1:58 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Freedom of speech (or expression) is easy to define, but the concept somehow gets fragmented whenever the speech (or the speaker) is unpopular. But the idea itself should never be a “stretch” –at least not in this country.

Freedom of speech is also easy to defend if the speech or the speaker is popular—or at least “acceptable.”

It may make various people sick to extend freedom of expression on behalf of the likes of Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Jack Kerouac, Saddam Hussein, David Dukes, Ward Churchill, Rush Limbaugh, Al Sharpton, Bill O’Rielly, Ted Kennedy…
But the fact is, the right to express oneself covers all points of view, no matter whether we agree or not with the expression or the expresser.

Too many people believe that freedom of expression…freedom of speech…is a right to be exercised by those who agree with THEIR point of view.

 

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home

free hit counter script