Freedom and Rights

In preparation to write this I looked up the word freedom and found many, but all similar to "Freedom is the right, or the capacity, of self-determination,as an expression of the individual will. ".

With that in mind lets look at what some people have found to be rights and freedom. I believe many have expanded the definitions of both freedom and rights. Rights for the purpose of our constitution and given by God and are given freely to all men and women. With this in mind a right should never extend to a single group of people but not all. Our country has not always done a good job of enforcing this standard, but in our humanity, what we codify into law should always be the standard and not our imperfection.

A big problem with our current society is that we change the language to fit our beliefs. One of the most basic rights is the Freedom of speech. This guarantees that Congress cannot pass laws inhibiting the freedom of speech. Sounds pretty simple, but over the years we have had many challenges to what that means. Recently we had the McCain Feingold bill. It was signed by President Bush and upheld by the Supreme Court. This is constitution on the basis that this applies to public airwaves which are governed by licences granted by the government and can be restricted by the government. That means it is something the government CAN do, not something the government should do. This gave rise to the so-called 527 groups we saw in the last election cycles such as the Swift Boat Veterans and Move-On.Org. People simply moved their money from the parties to these groups. What this has caused is a nastier brand of campaign, exactly one of the things the legislation was supposed to avoid.

Lets look at some things that don't make sense to me when you look at them in comparison. The American left has for some time and upheld by the Supreme Court that burning a flag is protected speech. The same groups want to revive the Fairness Doctrine. This would require that all opinion shows would need to be balanced by a dissenting opinion. The was repealed in the Reagan administration and gave birth the Talk Radio as we know it. This of course is objectionable to the left because they don't control this medium. Many attempts have been made, and some local and regional successes are present in left wing talk radio, but they have not found the left wing national host. Many arguments can be made as to why, and are interesting to have, but not in this essay.

Implementing the Doctrine would effectively kill talk radio. It would also kill your favorite talk TV shows. Keith Olberman (OK no one watches him, but he gets posted to YouTube a lot so there are some fringe people that like him). Chris Matthews gone! Amazingly I think Hannity and Combs might last since it is a debate show. Bill O'Reilly would probably not make it past muster. The crime that all of these people have committed against free speech? Elaborating an opinion. Since we now know the evening anchors of the main stream media are not impartial, we would have challenges to anchors like Katie Choric. it will be argued correctly that Katie should be balanced. All over the country Television and Radio licenses would be challenged and one of two things would happen. 1. They would lose their license for airing opinion not balanced, or 2. They would switch to safe non-opinionated programing. I believe this is what they would do. Financiers don't like to take risk with their capitol in broadcasting. Imagine this, demands to balance the last place network for network news.

For now I believe President Bush would not sign this into law and I don't believe they can override his veto, but what happens after the next election? It very well could be a Democrat who would rather see rioting and protests in the street as speech than people talking about Conservative politics on the radio peacefully. Not much of a choice to me. I simply cannot understand the views of people that want the Fairness Doctrine. I always respect others views, but simply cannot understand the rationale of them.