In Response to the Easily Offended: Hostility to Religion Harms No-One

In my morning routine, an aid to coffee in getting my cold-hearted blood recirculating comes with a quick once-over of the day's op-eds. In today's shabby pile of political nonsense, I found a pity party letter addressed to the “relatively small but powerful sector of society composed of influential people” who direct a “flood of hostility” toward the reverent which the author, Kelly Shackelford*, claims as detrimental to us all. The whole of the essay is rested on a dodgy survey conducted by Mr. Shackelford's own company which purports to document the “dramatic rise in attacks on religious liberty” in America during a three year period from '12 to '15.

Mr. Shackelford holds three executive positions at his presumptuously-named First Liberty Institute, a curious example of Alan Smithee's Law extending its reach outside cinema. According to my half-hearted research, the FLI is a forty-year-old religious advocacy organization with a spectacularly unoriginal modus operandi of attempting to use the First Amendment against itself. Their main field of work appears to be in the southwest regions, predominantly Texas with an apparent home base in Plano. I attempted to find out more about their history, but the parading links for “PRAY,” “LEGACY,” and “DONATE” on their homepage, bookended by intimidating headlines warning of science coming to take Jesus away, reminded me how meaningless the effort would be.

The FLI has made its hay wasting the court's time on frivolous hurt feelings lawsuits entirely revolving around the right of the religious to impose their nonsense on the rest of us in public places. The remarkably scant information I could find on them, barring their own statements and remembering that I don't care enough to look very hard, shows a history of attempting and failing to undermine the First Amendment for the reasons one would expect. Be it trying to force religious funeral services on members of our military in direct defiance of the family's wishes, sneaking scripture into schools piggybacked on candy canes, fighting against the removal of eyesores from the landscape, or a bizarre coverup of an investigation into Sarah Palin, there seems to be no windmill Mr. Shackelford won't tilt with.

As I also have a vendetta against the windmills, I wanted to go over the points Mr. Shackelford raises in his article, taking them in reverse order and trying valiantly not to roll my eyes out the back of my skull.

To start, Mr. Shackelford asserts that religious freedom is the most important provided in the First Amendment because all other freedoms are derived from it. “Without the concept of a higher authority to make government accountable to unchanging principles of justice,” he argues, “all other freedoms are at risk of being violated, redefined, or revoked...”

The concept of higher authority in and of itself would seem to erase the need for a government of the people to exercise it. Since there is no higher authority, it falls to imperfect and irrational primates like ourselves to make an effort to regulate ourselves. It should be obvious to you that at no point in our conception of justice has it ever been unchanging. The First Amendment is a wonderful example in that it is, by name, an amendment to what came before it. I shouldn't need to explain to you the ghastly reality that would exist if we operated on a judicial system that was biblically informed and unchanged for two millenia. It can be seen inside the borders of our unfortunate cousins to the east, locked in totalitarian nightmares of wholly religious construction.

It is true that the Establishment Clause is a vital support for our American way of life, but it is wildly arrogant to state, as Mr. Shackelford does, that it is the only pillar on which we build. In fact, the interdependency of the five components could not possibly be more obvious. The freedom to assemble makes the free expression of religion possible, for example, as well as free speech ensuring the press is not hampered by either the state or the church. Elevating established religion as a keystone doesn't make the amendment stronger, it hamstrings the ability of the population to avail themselves of the remaining mandates.

Religion crushes free press and free speech by allowing a subsection of the people to determine based on a whim what may or may not be publicly uttered. It eliminates our opportunity to read and hear people like Bill Nye, Neil Tyson, or Carl Sagan, not to mention smothering the advance of scientific progress in favor of idol worship. We would likely never even hear of these people or, in the well-known case of Mr. Rushdie, their church-funded death sentences, simply because they wouldn't exist in the form we know them. A religious government precludes the ability to petition and assemble against it, as any attempt to exist outside the narrow confines of religious law would obviously be profane. Mr. Shackelford's misguided idea that divinely-bestowed rights require a government to secure them belies both his inability to trust his fellow humans to govern themselves and his lack of faith in his god to enforce divine law, with all the unaddressed theological contradictions contained therein.

On to the second-most popular nonsense talking point used in these arguments (the first being the myth of America's Christian foundation): he asserts that criticizing religion harms us all in some vague, undefined way, and uses as example employees “being unlawfully fired,” businesses being “recklessly harmed,” public servants being “driven from their fields,” and religious authorities being “threatened or restricted” from engaging in activities that fall into the catchall of “spiritual callings.” As you can see from the segments of people Mr. Shackelford indicates, he is less concerned with us as a whole than he is with a the members of his particular faith. He offers no solid examples in the essay, and I will be damned if I'm going to buy his nonsense little pamphlet, but it can be easily guessed what kind of situations he's talking about.

Employees and public servants are fired every day, and to the best of my knowledge there are employment laws in place to ensure that an individual's religious attitude has no bearing on finding or losing a job, in fact prohibiting questions about faith during interviews and penalizing employers who are punitive against the religious. Mr. Shackelford intends a picture of well-meaning pious people being fired for having the temerity to proclaim a humble faith, but the only time I can think of people being fired for their religion is occasions where they used their faith to become overbearing and obtrusive in the workplace.

A key barrier to understanding on this point is the judgement held by Mr. Shackelford and the apparent majority of America's religious population that the First Amendment's mandate for free practice of religion includes the phrase “anytime, anywhere.” There is no logical way of interpreting the amendment to conclude that prayer must be in school, the workplace, or literally anywhere outside the walls of a church or home. Prayer is not a public trust, it is a private hobby, and cannot be elevated beyond that importance. Having even one crucifix hanging in your cubicle, making one child say “under God” every morning at school (not to mention the effort to force science teachers to use patently false and exclusionary curriculum), or denying one couple the right to the legal benefits of marriage is a blatant violation of the First Amendment. I don't suggest that public spaces such as parks or town squares fall under this description – and I would suggest that my non-believing contemporaries may wish to examine the thickness of their skin in that regard – but that offices, schools, and government institutions are in no way public spaces. As to the poor ministries, churches, and chaplains being prevented from their self-appointed business of deliberately deceiving children and running other people's lives, I repeat that the imposition of religious doctrine or authority is a violation of my First Amendment rights.

It is then argued that by restricting this nebulous “religious activity” in the name of “political correctness” we heathens are actually preventing the faithful from helping the less fortunate among us entirely. The empty-headed stupidity of this statement should be stunning, but I've heard it so often it's little better than childish white noise. Mr. Shackelford performs a grand sweep of his nauseatingly pious arm at this point, making several baseless assumptions that are easily rebutted. There is no way exclusionary rules such as preventing prayer in school restricts public service by the faithful, unless one looks at lying to schoolchildren when they should be learning facts and how to peacefully co-exist as public service, and I certainly do not. Also, clumsily hidden in the assertion is Mr. Shackelford's belief that people without faith do not do charitable works or make efforts to assist the weaker. This kind of pompous posturing is very common in religious circles, comedically illustrating that they are actually heartless and cruel people who wouldn't help a fellow human if they weren't forced to by way of their membership in a mindless cult. It is the tacit admission of Mr. Shackelford himself that if he wasn't born when and where he was, he wouldn't give a damn for the helpless or destitute.

The “political correctness” condemned in the essay is a little harder for me to pin down, as it's always been a meaningless and intangible phrase. If he's referring to the assertion of my contemporaries that the stranglehold religion historically and presently exerts on our nation is in need of correction, often through political means, then I accept the charge. If, however, he refers to the hyphenation and evisceration of our collective language, or an effort from the political left to rectify social injustices through forced advancement, obviously the accusation is baseless. Our politicians preface empty soundbites with the phrase “As a Christian,” not “Christian-American.” This suggests to me that having the poor judgement to think your ill-founded ideas should have a place in public policy is efficient shorthand for identifying you as an American. And surely Mr. Shackelford isn't suggesting that the political left is working to advance people of religious faith above others, as he clearly intends them to come to mind when he mentions the “small but powerful … influential people and organizations.” This strikes me as a kind of frenzied opposition to the perceived LA/NY set without having to decide if one is anti-homosexual or anti-semitic.

The essay then hits a rather pathetic note, wherein Mr. Shackelford seems to have a passing understanding of the weakness and incoherence of his argument as illustrated by resorting to tugging my capitalist heartstrings. He quotes one Dr. Rodney Stark's work “How Religion Benefits Everyone” which claims, according to Mr. Shackelford, almost three trillion dollars in benefits to America every year as a direct result of people being religious. This benefit comes in a handful of deliberately vague arenas such as crime reduction, education, mental and physical health, employment, and welfare. Stark's interview with the National Review is fairly revealing as to the poor ethic he applies to his chosen work, and the underlying inability of the religious defenders to think either critically or in a straight line. I wasn't able to find any secondhand information regarding Dr. Stark that was worth citing, so without expecting you to lend it any gravity I will still point out that a search of the good doctor's name provided me with around thirty links, only one of which was not a faith-based organization of some kind, coincidentally also the only critical one and containing an assertion that the doctor had not been taken seriously for over a decade.

Now we come to Mr. Shackelford's ab initio failure: the idea that criticizing, attacking, or in any way restricting a religious faith or the members thereof hurts – another nebulous charge – individuals and families. “The attacks we surveyed” – Mr. Shackelford claims 1,285 of these completely undefined and unqualified attacks over the aforementioned three year period – “are sweeping away small businesses, careers, and ministries.” Since no examples were provided in the essay, I'll attempt to illustrate on assumption why he's wrong.

“Small businesses” means gay wedding cakes, as far as I can tell. On the face of it, the right to refuse service seems reasonable, but there is an important distinction that sometimes gets missed. We refuse service, with very few exceptions, based on things that can be changed: required height for safety equipment to be effective, relative level of intoxication, the proximal relationship of shirts and shoes vis a vis your body, and so on. Refusing service to a person based on color or sexual compass, even once, is nothing but half-pint tyranny of the majority.

“Careers” means that awful woman in the Midwest denying marriage licenses to homosexual couples, and the careers of people of that stripe should be destroyed. Public work means public trust, and putting your own beliefs over the law is a clear violation of that trust.

“Ministries” is slightly more complicated. Mr. Shackelford claims his faith as a “long-held American form” that is being cruelly discriminated against, indicating he means that larger ephemeral Christian ministry (which is somehow both the foundational faith of America that the majority of her citizens actively practice and a maligned and oppressed underdog being warred against by that same population). This ministry is represented on our money and airwaves, it's shoehorned into our politics and business, it is unavoidable in American life. Like a disease, it clings to our skin and resists our efforts to cleanse ourselves. It supports us as the rope supports the hanging man.

If, instead, Mr. Shackelford means actual physical buildings of ministry, churches and so forth, he is again wildly misrepresenting the situation. Churches of all stripes are literally everywhere in our nation. The church is the oldest and original building in many towns, especially where I come from, and often the largest both in height and square footage. I would love to see his jibbering protestation be true, as it would create an actual tangible financial benefit to all citizens as previously wasted and misused high-value land began generating tax.

From tip to tail Mr. Shackelford's essay is a self-serving fluff piece that still passes for weighty analysis in his grubby little circles, something I'm actually quite good at and it offends me to see it done so poorly. His claim of a handful of anti-religious “attacks” is shamefully pale compared to the body count incurred by people like him. How weak and frightening it must feel to have a faith so ubiquitous and yet so utterly fragile. Mr. Shackelford is to be pitied in this regard, but his groundless conclusions are not his alone. He is continuing the narrative of the religious right that relies on failures of critical thinking, crying before anyone's hit you, and claiming that the protestations of the person whose neck you're standing on are biased against the unchoked.

*While it probably would have been simple to find a picture of Kelly Shackelford on the FLI website to ascertain for certain, due to the ambiguity of the first name I am unclear as to the author's gender. I have assumed the masculine, because while it is not impossible for women to hold these same casually ignorant ideas and write about them eloquently, I think it far more likely the opposite is true in this case.

Render Unto Caesar

The road from “congress shall make no law” to tax-free churches, congressional chaplains, and currency sanctioned by Christianity is marked by complacency and conciliation on the part of the non-believers.

The argument, which you have no doubt heard plenty of times, that America was founded by people who worshipped the washboard-stomached Jesus seen in Pat Robertson's dusty sexual fantasies and who desired to build a new nation devoted to the glorification of that filthy hippie and his bizarre and thoughtless teachings is still pressed into service today, trotted out like a moth-eaten shawl to be draped over any number of the debates we face.

Despite the obvious unconstitutionality of the entire premise, to this very day the United States military pays official chaplains to serve in every branch out of taxpayer-funded government coffers, and has had authorization to do so since 1791. There is no interpretation of the establishment or free exercise clauses of the First Amendment that allows for a government-sanctioned chaplain of any denomination to minister to the armed forces, which is self-evident without the authority of Madison or Jefferson and their arguments to back it up. Despite being challenged in the United States Court of Appeals, no willingness has been shown to risk displeasing America's religious theocrats by forcing the position to be filled by a non-combat volunteer. The irony of a paid military chaplain swearing to uphold the Constitution should be obvious without me having to elaborate on it. Fortunately, those of us who would have no idea how to approach addressing the problem are shored up by the efforts of organizations like the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Military Association of Atheists, both of whom work not only to defend the rights of the non-religious in both private and military life, but to re-establish the secular values our country was, evidentially speaking, established on.

We were pretty into Egyptian and Grecian style, though. Kind of our "Joy Division" phase.

Deism was, to be profoundly generous, still defensible at the time of America's establishment. Collectively, we were unfamiliar with microbiology and the Beagle's monumental voyage was still half a century away. It could be forgiven, knowing what the best scientific information was, for a thinking person to come to the conclusion that the intrinsic order in the universe – “the way of things” – was so impossibly clockwork and perfect as to necessitate, at the very least, an unimaginable force to establish the observable laws things operated by. This is the “unmoved mover” you may have heard of, a current favorite of the creationist cults to explain away their utter mindless arrogance in the face of an utter paucity of any evidence. It may not only have been defensible or forgivable, it may have been the only logical and rational conclusion one could come to based on the evidence at hand. Theism, with its nonsense based on an intervening wrathful creator who performs miracles and picks favorites, was already in decline among the population possessed of the luxury of free time to participate in Enlightenment thinking. People understood that a prime mover argument can and does only lead you to an infinitely regressing repetition of the same question: “Who made the maker?” These volleys of logic were met by the church, then as now, with vehement retaliation and dismissals based on arguments from ignorance. Unfortunately for us but incredibly beneficial for the religious, the tools with which the notion of a creator could be abolished entirely were still generations off.

The Presidents

George Washington appears to have been that most rare (and personally valuable to myself) of all religious people: the private one. While it is public record that he purchased pews in several churches and attended services regularly while in Philadelphia, Washington chose to spend his time at Mount Vernon more wisely. He attended services sparsely there, according to biographer Paul Ford, and later anecdotes seeking to discredit him publicly did so by reporting that cards and drinking were engaged in by Washington and visitors to his home most vigorously on Sundays. Washington almost never mentioned God by name in public speeches, referring instead to the ideas of Providence and a Grand Architect. His farewell address, which is most commonly referenced as concrete proof of Washington's Christian faith, was not written by him but by Alexander Hamilton, and Washington in fact deliberately removed passages connecting morality with divinity and avoided entirely addressing any particulars of his belief. As for his behavior in solitude, both Hamilton and Washington's staff write of interrupting his morning prayer, which was evidently a regular and solitary-by-preference practice. It is still contended that Washington introduced the oath of fealty to God in the presidential inauguration, despite refutations from the Library of Congress and Mount Vernon. People far more educated on Washington's life than myself continue to argue from both sides of the aisle exactly where on the spectrum from deism to Christianity he actually lied, but insofar as this subject is concerned his exact disposition is irrelevant. What matters is that if he was a devout and practicing Christian, he kept it to himself.

And we revere him to this day...

Thomas Jefferson, as a retirement hobby to kill the time not spent founding the University of Virginia as a bastion of higher learning unsullied by religious influence, engaged himself by taking a scalpel to the New Testament, removing any and all passages which he thought to be unfounded, magical, or otherwise insulting to the intelligence of a reasoned person. The resulting extant text, which is available to all, is an impossibly-thin tome which tells a rather uninteresting story of a young man who says things that irritate some while endearing him to others. The final page of this story, which I find the most edifying, is three paragraphs long and consists of Jesus dying, being buried, and everyone leaving. No resurrection, no fanciful rays of sunshine to be recreated in hideous oil paintings for the next two millenia, but the relating of a man's death. Furthermore, in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (one of the three things included on his obelisk as worth remembering him for, his time as President notably absent) Jefferson writes clearly on the errancy of religious faction having any influence in civil discourse whatsoever. In dissolving any affiliation between the colonies and the Church of England, Jefferson sought to prevent the cudgel of a state church from being wielded against the citizens of the new republic. The worst accusation that could be leveled at him would be the aforementioned label of deist, as he describes a creator of the mind and “departure from the plan” enforced on the populace by religious leaders who sought – then as now – to prevent the free exchange of ideas while lining their own pockets. However, nowhere does he mention any thought that the universe was created for him or anyone else, or that an intervening creator answered prayers, affected the outcome of events, or had a preferred sexual style. The personification of this deistic creator by Jefferson in the Statute, sometimes feebly pointed to as support for accusations of theism, can also be accurately dismissed as a poetic device, seeing as he later gives the concept of truth the same embodiment, albeit feminine.

Again, super respectful reverence is all we know how to do.

The Treaty of Tripoli & The First Barbary War

Securing our independence brought the need to ensure our own security. The treaties enacted by England to protect trade routes and crew obviously no longer applied to our nation, and in 1797 John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli into law. This treaty was to establish our business and cautiously peaceful relationship with the Muslim empire in the Barbary States, who consistently had great success in seizing both our ships and their crew for their own use. The second article of the Treaty, which I argue is second only to the First Amendment in clarity and intent of purpose, states as follows:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen; and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

It's a rather beautiful passage, I think, especially when compared to the soul-crushingly indigestible language of our current legislation. But beyond beauty, the most important thing about this passage is that it clearly shows the intention of our nation to hold no brook with religion. Adams may have been far too naive and trusting when concerned with the Muslim theocracy and the ability of its adherents to be trusted, and he was completely mistaken in implying that our non-starter status meant we would never declare war against a religious state, but it couldn't be more obvious that our founding and principles are established as those of a secular nation founded on the rule of law, not a terrifying theocratic nightmare based on deluded religious texts.

It really is everything Hitchens warned us about.

Proving Adams' trust was wildly misplaced, the forces of Tripoli continued to hijack and make slaves of American ships. Seeking explanation, Adams and Jefferson traveled to Tripoli, where their only response was passages in the Qur’an commanding “all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.” Jefferson fought with Congress, arguing that any money paid would only encourage repeated offense. Upon Jefferson's election, Tripoli vastly increased the amount of their demands, which Jefferson finally had the power to refuse. The Navy, recently reconstructed, was at Jefferson's disposal with the caveat to do no more than necessary to defend. Without consulting Congress Jefferson sent the Navy to attack Tripoli, beginning the four year conflict that would end with General Eaton's marines and mercenaries brought the city of Derna to the ground in 1805. This is, by the way, the first time the American flag was flown over a military victory in a foreign land, and the reason Tripoli is in the second line of the Marine Corps Hymn.

The Money

When the time came, as it must in any successful fledgling rebellion, to design a national seal representative of the ideals of the new republic, Samuel Adams appointed an artist in Philadelphia called William Barton. The now-familiar thirteen-layer pyramid crowned with the Eye of Providence was what Barton delivered, with the wholly unfamiliar-to-us latin phrases Deo Favente (“With God's Favor”) and Perennis (“Everlasting”). There was no attempt on Barton's behalf to obfuscate his intentions and belief that the Providential Eye belonged to an intervening Christian god, which was clearly not good enough for Adams.

It rocks your very world, doesn't it?

Charles Thompson, the Secretary of the Congress and a teacher of latin, was tasked with refining the design to bring it more in line with what Adams wanted. Thompson removed the religious references entirely, substituting the phrases Annuit Coeptis (“To/He Approve/s Our Undertaking”) and Novus Ordo Seclorum (“New Order of the Ages”) while retaining the thirteen-layer pyramid, Eye of Providence, and E Pluribus Unum (“One Out Of Many”). This adjustment fulfilled the requirements, changing the intended message from “God gave us this and it's ours forever” to “Can you guys fucking believe how lucky we were to pull this off?”

"I gotcha Deo Favente right here, pal."

The ridiculous motto of the United States since 1956 has been “In God We Trust,” a noxious phrase opposed by anyone who can recognize the meaninglessness of the words even without recognizing the direct contradiction to our nation's principles. This indelicate usurper is a holdover from the Civil War, where the phrase was used by both sides to claim divine support. Since at least 1873, this mindless affirmation has been on our coinage by order of the Congress, not appearing on the paper money until 1957. The same level of blind fervor for empty religious-themed patriotism wouldn't be seen again until the World Trade Center attack, when once again our Union claimed the backing of – for all anyone can tell – the same god who compelled our enemies.

The Congress

In examining religion's perfidious influence on democracy, specifically in our representative bodies, it is helpful to compare the original intent with the current reality. Given that, ideally, both the House and Senate would be filled with individuals selected by their communities as best suited to represent their interests and ideals, one would expect the resulting bodies to reflect the broad spectrum of ideas and attitudes seen nationwide. To examine that a little closer, we can apply that most tenuous of metrics: the public opinion poll. Opinion polls always make me wince the slightest bit, as there are so many clumsily simple ways their data becomes skewed. From convenience bias to acquiescence, these kinds of surveys have many obstacles to assembling data into information, but in many cases they are the best possible way to gauge what people say they think.

Which, unfortunately, assumes *they* know what they think.

Pew Research reported in 2012 that 16.1% of Americans who responded to their poll self-identified as having no religious affiliation. As mentioned, there is no reliable way to determine what percentage of people who respond in the affirmative are lying to the pollster to fulfill an imagined expectation, or claiming affiliation out of habit or guilt. As you can infer for yourself, it is improbable that there exist enough physical structures to house all the worshippers who claim to be such fervent practitioners.

There are 535 voting members of Congress, which would suggest that roughly 86 members of that august body should be atheist. If we further narrow the field by disregarding the 5.8% of Pew respondents who felt “religious unaffiliated” described their views (as opposed to the rather confusing group labeled “secular unaffiliated”) we are left with around 55 Congresspeople that should reliably be found doing something useful on Sunday morning. This is, self-evidently, at odds with the precisely zero (sometimes one, as of late, but not for long) representatives of the nation's public who profess to be unburdened by childish superstition, and flies in the face of the decidedly Christian-flavored political grandstanding we must constantly slog through.

It can only feed, never produce...

It may actually be fair and accurate to say that America is a Christian nation, not by design but through lazy arrogance or weakness on the part of those of us who knew better. To call it de facto is to give it too much credence, but the fact remains. To admit this is not to agree with the historically ignorant who claim a Christian founding for our nation, nor is it further concession or conciliation to theocracy with an enthusiastic allowance for it to reign. The fervor with which the cry of rationality and forced retreat for religion seems to keep growing can only suggest to us that the tide turns in our favor. We can perhaps now be said to be in recovery, a nation with a serious problem that we have just recently become mature enough to accept and fix.

The Moral Necessity To Shout Fire

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was a simple-minded fool who had no more business adjudicating on our nation's affairs than the blonde mannequins that populate our morning news programs. The only opinion of Holmes that anyone seems to be able to quote (done so with no knowledge of whom to attribute the quote to) is his noxious idea that the first amendment somehow does not protect a person from “shouting fire falsely in a crowded theater.” Ignoring for the moment that no one remembers to include the word “falsely” in their recitation, I intend to argue that all forms of speech are to be protected and allowed, and particularly those which are found offensive, against popular opinion, or otherwise uncomfortable for people to be exposed to.

Holmes' oft-cited ramblings about behavioral necessities while one is at the theater were, in fact, an attempt to backpedal on a previous opinion that leaflet distributors arguing against the conscription of men to fight as a violation of the thirteenth amendment's prohibition of involuntary servitude. This primer on constitutional law was deemed by Holmes to be a “clear and present danger” to the country in wartime because of the possibility of “substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” The consequence of these leaflets would be a mindless trampling panic akin to people rushing out of Holmes' “crowded theater.” The education of our populace was seen as being in conflict with the military's ability to increase enlistment, and the effort to educate was punished with conviction under outmoded espionage laws in the name of national security.

The attempt to mitigate his colossally thoughtless judgment was set to paper in November of 1919, eight months after the Schenck trial's conclusion, in the United States' prosecution of Jacob Abrams and others for distributing leaflets written in Yiddish protesting American involvement in Russia's October Revolution through our obstruction of the Bolsheviks and supply of weapons to the Republic. It is said that in the intervening time friends of Holmes, including the spectacularly-named Learned Hand, worked through argument to persuade Holmes to a less reactionary position on the rights of free speech. Given how shortsighted and single-minded Holmes was, complete with a belief that the law should be based entirely in experience instead of logic, his friends were acting less as debate opponents and more as cattlemen: trying desperately to keep a brain-damaged runaway cow from trampling over any more people than it absolutely had to.

In the Abrams judgment, Holmes wrote that the defendants didn't have the means necessary to actually carry out their intended goals, and therefore did not fit under the C&PD umbrella. Their goals were to change public opinion about American engagement in foreign civil wars, which seems only slightly different to me than changing public opinion on involuntary conscription. Holmes argues that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” which flies in the face of his repeated decisions to crush free expression wherever it conflicted with national interest. Had he been at all consistent in his judgments, or treated the poor and insignificant as Americans with a voice instead of as the great unwashed, perhaps his judicial mark would not be so shallow and easily dismissed. As it is, however, using the opinions of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as any kind of litmus test for modern judges – sitting on the Supreme Court or otherwise – is equivalent to judging your physical well-being against the healthiest leper.

All kinds of speech are worth the fight it might take to hear them, but none more so than the opinions which it is easy to identify as hateful and/or unpopular. Additionally, anyone who tries to suppress or eliminate the free expression of ideas should immediately be considered an enemy, if for no other reason than they think they know better than you do what is acceptable for you to hear or read. It is a sign of mental deficiency, if not outright disease, to be invested so fully in one perspective but so unstable and without confidence in it that any conflicting view which presents itself is a mortal threat to all one holds dear; it is equally a sign of a diseased mind when any individual feels it is appropriate for one group of people to control the expression of any other group. Neo-Nazi marches don't seem to be popular anywhere, but I take pride in the fact that we, as a culture, not only allow them to march but provide them with police protection to defend them against people like me who might seek to physically harm them.

This speaks to the aspect of free speech that I find the most straightforward, but also the trickiest. All speech should be allowed under all circumstances, but in order to exercise this freedom we need to re-examine our attitudes about personal responsibility and return to giving it the high regard it deserves. To be clear: say anything you want at any time, but be prepared for the consequences. Saying something particularly forward at a nightclub and getting a drink thrown in your face is no different than expressing your world view and suffering much more serious consequences such as loss of employment or social ostracization. The gallons of drinks I wore throughout my second decade never once suppressed my freedom of speech, they were a direct consequence of my exercising that freedom.

I smelled like Carmen Miranda's hat, with subtle notes of shame

To return to the childish and arrogant statement I began with, it is proper to draw a distinction between statements like holocaust denial or religious belief and the statement in question, which is – we are to imagine – standing up in a theater full of people and shouting fire without cause in an effort to spur evacuation. The tacit social contracts we operate under on a daily basis do not exclude saying offensive or ignorant things, but we have a wholly different and innate reaction when someone's utterance passes the realm of conversation and normal everyday speech into the territory of alarm-raising.

As social animals, it is of great benefit to us when people who are aware of something detrimental that is unknown to us extend a warning so that we may avoid it. This ranges from very minor things like flashing headlights to warn oncoming traffic of an obstruction they cannot see yet to very major things like alerting large groups of people that the building they are in is currently ablaze. In that worst-case scenario, hearing the shout of fire and seeing the mass of people heading in the opposite direction tells me everything I need to know about what to do. We rely on this stimulus response heavily, and react to it almost immediately and without hesitation, which is why raising an alarm falsely is such an easy thing to despise.

"Has shit gone pear-shaped? Then don't be a dick." - Famous British Guy

From childhood, we are taught that lying about crisis ruins your credibility, and when something bad inevitably happens your cries for help will be ignored and a wolf will eat your face. We understand, without having it explained, that we depend on one another for our safety and survival; exploitation of that dependence is therefore a threat to safety and survival. This is why invoking the “crowded theater” still has such a visceral response for us, but it is a misplaced and inaccurate argument because raising an alarm is not the same thing as expression of an idea. It would be inexcusable to falsely sound an air raid siren, but no one can raise a serious argument about Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” broadcast, no matter how many panicked idiots decided to lose their minds without listening past the ten minute mark.

"I'm a symbolic representation of an imagined external threat. Rarr!"

There will never be a deficit of people with offensive opinions who make them public, and it follows that we won't run out of people who are duly offended and publicly respond. This is the best possible thing for our culture, and one of the only things I expect we'll still be trying to protect a century from now. I argue that this defense is vital not strictly for me, so that I can read and watch and listen to whatever I may choose, but so that other people will say things that I had never thought of or things I disagree with, and so others still may respond. This idea seems astonishingly simple and obvious to me, but someone regarded as an exemplary Supreme Court Justice couldn't wrap his ridiculous mustache around it.

Seriously, fuck this guy.