Ever been a public school teacher? It's wonderful: everything you can think of saying is either racist or anti-Semitic or homophobic or it promotes alcohol ... If teachers work within so many constraints, then To Kill a Mockingbird is about the most intellectually-challenging thing that can be discussed in history and language arts classes.
Sure, the Constitution doesn't say that we should be able to say whatever we want anywhere. It only says that the government shouldn't make any laws "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." And we can't expect freedom of speech everywhere; our our Founding Fathers must certainly have anticipated that there would be bars in places like Detroit, and I doubt they wanted little kids talking like they're in a Monty Python movie. In this blog post I won't address any legal or philosophical matters regarding the First Amendment. I am not qualified to. Instead, I will talk about the idea of freedom of speech, and about its absence - usually not due to the government - and the causes and results of its absence.
To start with, according to a poll by GFK America, 77 percent of Americans believe in angels. They were asked explicitly. What the hell has allowed this to happen? Or, to give a more cliched example, a in a 2010 Gallup poll, 40% of respondents agreed with the statement "God created man in present form," whereas 16% agreed that "Man developed [via evolution], but God had no part in process."
Seriously, with statistics so disgusting, we should do what we can to at least try understand this phenomenon, so that we can learn how to help Americans out of it and ensure they never go back. In understanding the causes, we should look at the scriptures themselves, in addition to social and cultural factors. Regarding the former, western religion is oppressive at many levels, if you combine the radicalism of the New Testament with the Kim Jong-ilism of the Old Testament. Fortunately, the custom has always to pick and choose, so that we follow only the parts that we agree with, or that we're told to agree with.
To be continued ...
