Censors In, Liberty Out

From The American Thinker:

June 30, 2010


Censors In, Liberty Out

Eileen F. Toplansky



We are learning that Elena Kagan would be quite comfortable subverting the First Amendment's right to free speech. In May of this year, activist Nat Hentoff, renowned authority on the First Amendment, sounded the alarm when he wrote that "last September, Kagan, then Obama's solicitor general was asked to consider the government's case for limits to corporations' political speech rights (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission). During the oral argument, Chief Justice John Roberts asked Kagan how far the government could censor corporations' political speech. Roberts queried, "If you say you are not going to apply (censorship) to a book (about the candidates), what about a pamphlet?"





Kagan, a former Dean of the Harvard Law School replied, "I think a pamphlet would be different. A pamphlet is pretty classic electioneering." So, in her judgment, the government could penalize such corporate speech.





American patriot Thomas Paine, author of the pamphlet "Common Sense," and the "The Crisis" is turning over in his grave as is Samuel Adams, author of the pamphlet entitled "The Rights of the Colonists." The stench emanating from Obama and his cohorts is getting stronger by the day.





Chief Justice Roberts wrote:





"The [Obama] government urges us in this case to uphold a direct prohibition on political speech. It asks us to embrace a theory of the First Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, the Internet, and virtually any other medium that corporations and unions might find useful in expressing their view on matters of public concern.



"Its theory, if accepted, would empower the Government to prohibit newspapers from running editorials or opinion pieces supporting or opposing candidates for office, so long as the newspapers were owned by corporations-as the major ones are. First Amendment rights could be confined to individuals, [thus] subverting the vibrant public discourse that is at the foundation of our democracy."





Thus, as Anthony G. Martin has opined, it is clear that the nomination of Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court is intended to bolster the Obama's intention to censor anything he chooses. Obama, the dictator would come full circle.





Why aren't the journalists up in arms about this? Don't they see that this is yet another of Obama's serial double-crossing strategy? He smooth talks a group, invites them into his lair, and then tears them apart when they are no longer useful to him. What is blinding reporters who cannot perceive the end result of the ill-named Fairness Doctrine, a tactic of Obama who has publicly stated that he wants to suppress and control conservative talk radio, for starters?





In his book entitled Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, Anatoli Kuznetsov writes,





"...books are always being burnt. The library at Alexandria went up in flames, the Inquisition had their bonfires...books were burnt under Stalin; there have been bonfires in the squares under Hitler, and there will be more and more of them burnt. There are always more people to burn books than to write them...this is the first sign of trouble-if books are burned, that means things are going wrong. It means that you are surrounded by force, fear and ignorance, that power is in the hands of the barbarians."





Of course, Mr. Obama, the genteel, would never actually stoop to burning books -- yet!





But censorship has always been the prelude to the bonfires.





The fact that a Jewish woman would even consider censorship makes this all the more vile. She, of all people, should recall "a rule worth remembering: Wherever hatred against Jews became inflamed, Jewish books or Jews or both were burned. Such events took place in pagan Rome in the first century of the Common Era, in Christian Spain in the fifteenth century and in Nazi Germany in the twentieth century."





Nine years before the furnaces in Auschwitz and other death camps were lit, Jewish books were consigned to the flames in Germany. The flames that burned the portrait of Albert Einstein became the signal for the first bonfire. Jewish history shows that side by side with their books, especially the Talmud, Jews themselves were burned as well. This occurred in Paris in the thirteenth century, in Rome and in Holland in the sixteenth, in Poland in the eighteenth. As People of the Book, Jews and their books suffered a common fate.





That Ms. Kagan would give a scintilla of aid to bolster the Obama Administration's intention to undo the First Amendment is a terrifying attack on American liberties.





Eileen can be reached at middlemarch18@gmail.com.

Posted at 08:51 AM