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The Marine Corp killed Allen Lee’s contract with them becuase of his essay?
Dang. I’m going to have to teach my kids to write like that.
Rerailing…
I was in high school in 1984. You can imagine the sort of thing a friend and I wrote about. (I think I still have a copy of it somewhere, though the dot-matrix printing may have faded to near illegibility.) Nor will I try to pretend it wasn’t awful, right down to the “only a dream” ending.
I can only imagine what a silly story about a totalitarian school administration, that ends with one of the authors shooting the other, would earn us both today…
I’m gonna surprise a few people.
I followed the link to the Web page that re-prints Lee’s essay, and I didn’t find it particularly disturbing or disquieting. I’ve read far worse.
I suppose in today’s day and age the remark about “inspiring the first CG shooting” might legitimately raise a few eyebrows. Perhaps it might even give police probable cause to investigate Lee. But in the absence of any evidence that Lee was any sort of a threat… they arrested him for the mere words? Upsetting people is now a crime?
This may have changed since I was in college (I graduated in ’92), but the last I knew the SCOTUS had ruled that threatening language had to be specific in order to fall outside of the bounds of the First Amendment. The case involved a 1960s protest during which one of the ringleaders yelled out to the crowd, “We’ll take to the f*cking streets later!” He was arrested for inciting a riot. But the SCOTUS ruled that this was protected speech because the speaker provided no specificity as to which streets nor when “later” would be.
The problem with criminalizing speech simply because it upsets people is that different people are upset by different things. There’s no rational way to codify the boundaries so that we all know what’s what. Libel/slander, fraudulent advertising, and death threats against specific people are rightly out of bounds because they can be directly linked to a specific and tangible harm. But upsetting people? If that’s a crime, a lot of us who post here regularly are screwed.
When does the book-burning start? I nominate the Bible to go first. Face it, the OT has some seriously disturbing and upsetting content.
>The problem with criminalizing speech simply because it upsets people is that different people are upset by different things. There’s no rational way to codify the boundaries so that we all know what’s what.
What’s to figure? The people in charge usually set up the laws in ways which protect them, and their interests first and foremost. Why should speech be any different?
Bill Myers is completely right about this. Too many people believe freedom of speech is the right of everyone else to agree with you.