“Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority.”
–McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, 514 U.S. 334 (1995)
Yet another politician confuses the U.S. with China or North Korea:
Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal.The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site. Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.
If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.
One wonders what goes through the minds of hillbilly legislators when they proclaim their idiocy to the world in this manner. One wonders how such people figure out which shoe goes on which foot. (Do they even wear shoes in Kentucky?)
One can I suppose forgive Mr. Couch for not being an attorney, but can one really forgive him for not asking an attorney whether anonymous speech (such as, e.g., The Federalist Papers) is protected by the First Amendment? Or whether the question of anonymous Internet posting has been previously addressed? Or can one really forgive him for not taking all of ten seconds, four words and Google to find his own answer?
And, most importantly, can one forgive him for not giving a damn one way or the other? He had a jackass proposal tailored to his jackass constituents. What does the Constitution have to have do with it, right?
Just another hard-working day for another hard-working politician. Unfortunately.
(Via Slashdot.)
5 responses so far ↓
Link Geek // Mar 11, 2008 at 10:26 am
I think this goes without saying, but on a blog whose author has consistently defined all politicians as moral defectives, and rightfully so, calling a spade a spade should not be construed as suggesting New York politicians (or in my case NJ) are somehow better.
That would be giving them too much credit.
Link Zach // Mar 11, 2008 at 11:22 am
I bet it has more to do with stopping anonymous campaign speech in a post-McCain-Feingold world.
Link Jeffrey Deutsch // Mar 11, 2008 at 11:41 am
Hello Kip,
One wonders what went through your mind when when you proclaimed what you did in the manner you did. If this had been, say, a bill in the Israeli Knesset, what would you have called their MPs, and would you have asked if they all dropped dead of heat exhaustion from wearing their black prayer coats all the time?
That certainly is a jackass (and I suspect also pachydermic) proposal. Unfortunately, your response may not convince people that free speech on the Internet should be a priority.
[Kip replies: Your analogy is asinine.]
Link Geek // Mar 11, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I didn't realize that it was our burden to convince others that the protection of liberty, especially (albeit unfortunately) an enumerated right was a "priority".
Unfortuneately, this attitude, that we have to convince "the people" to grant us rights via democratic process, as rotten and as repugnant as it is to any lover of liberty, is far more prevalent than a presumption of liberty which puts the burden on government.
Whether one wishes to question their "hillbillyness", their ability to put their shoes on or count the number of teeth they have is irrelevant. It is idiocy, and if it was in the Israeli Knesset, well, I would have the same contempt towards them as well.
Link Jeffrey Deutsch // Mar 11, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Hello Geek,
Whichever way the presumption lies, the fact is that there is and always will be some disputed territory. One who argues for (or against) the primacy of free speech over other virtues in a given situation (including public civility, avoidance of libel and defamation of character and ethnic harmony) has to convince others to make his/her preferred virtues a priority.
There may be a presumption in favor of freedom of speech, but it is always rebuttable, and the question of whether or not it has been rebutted in a given case is almost always a matter of priority (at least at the margin).
You may have misunderstood my response to Kip. He included, in his denunciation of the proposal from Kentucky, some ethnic slurs about Kentuckians, namely (1) the implication that they are still poor (and possibly ignorant) rural folk who go barefoot and (2) the term "hillbilly," which in this context is definitely a slur.
Comparable insinuations and slurs about, say, Jews or blacks (or for that matter, most ethnic groups other than Appalachians or poor Southerners) normally get people fired on the spot. For example, just ask George Allen, whose mouth cost him his job, his aides their jobs and every Republican U.S. Senator majority status.
Ad hominem mud-slinging is wrong. Ethnic ad hominems are very wrong. Ethnic ad hominems on one's blog, in an effort to promote free speech on the Internet, are – to use Kip's word – asinine.
Cheers,
Jeff Deutsch