Liberals clamoring to "Hush Rush" or "Flush Rush" or whatever else they want to do to him are not violating his free speech rights, but rather exercising their own rights.We all have a God-given right to speak freely, and the First Amendment to the US Constitution says only that government may not abridge it:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.Government may not prohibit your exercise of free speech, but that doesn't stop private citizens from telling one another to shut the hell up, and depending on the context, telling someone to STFU is not a violation of the target's rights.
FreeThinke, driven to madness because I won't get off the topic of abortion, birth control and how our rights fit around those subjects, unleashed a vulgar fusillade to provoke me, a free-speech advocate, to acknowledge that there are limits.
Of course there are limits. To understand what they are, we must ground the discussion in our natural rights of liberty and property.
Property is the key
You can speechify in whatever manner you wish on your property. Come to the Casa Silverfiddle, and you no longer are at liberty to say what the hell ever you want. We have standards at our house. They're pretty loose, but if you abuse them you will be asked to leave. Disrupt the comment thread with your petty little hissy fights or off-topic tirades, and you could be zapped. Stand up in the middle of a string quartet performance and start singing Megadeth songs, and you'll get tossed out. Whoever controls the property makes the rules, and that's as it should be.
You can speechify in whatever manner you wish on your property. Come to the Casa Silverfiddle, and you no longer are at liberty to say what the hell ever you want. We have standards at our house. They're pretty loose, but if you abuse them you will be asked to leave. Disrupt the comment thread with your petty little hissy fights or off-topic tirades, and you could be zapped. Stand up in the middle of a string quartet performance and start singing Megadeth songs, and you'll get tossed out. Whoever controls the property makes the rules, and that's as it should be.
Trolls
I started making forays into Left Blogistan a few years back, and ended up getting Banned from a Lefty Kook Site. It burned me up because I was on-topic and had called no names. Here's what I wrote about the experience:
Sinclair Lewis famously said: "Fascism will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a Bible." That may have been true in 1935, but it is now outdated, since the bible and the flag no longer enjoy a prominent position in our left-dominated popular culture.
Fascism is already creeping up on us in the form of left-think political correctness. It is enforced by narrow-minded people who ignorantly call themselves liberals. It is writ large in workplaces, academia, and popular culture. But for big fascism to work, it requires thousands of little mini-me fascists. And these petty tyrants already practice it in thousands of petty fiefdoms scattered across our nation.A few years later I got kicked out of a blog rather rudely and told in no uncertain terms to never return. I still believe it was a petty potentate thing to do, because I was polite to everyone, although I did vigorously impugn the sources of their information, so they kicked me out.
However dictatorial and narrow-minded I may think their actions were, they had the right to do it. Each blog serves a purpose, and when interlopers disrupt that purpose, they are not just "exercising their free speech rights," they are interfering with the rights of many others to have a free exchange of ideas. Some blogs like this one enjoy a robust clash of ideas, while others do not want their group-think bubble popped, and both are within their rights.
