Overcriminalizing Childhood: Maryland Turns Distressing Speech Into A Crime

by Hans Bader on April 6, 2013 · 1 comment

in Legal, Personal Liberty

Under the First Amendment, the government has far less power to restrict speech when it acts as a sovereign (such as when it criminally prosecutes people for their speech) than when it uses non-criminal disciplinary tools to regulate speech in its own government offices or (in certain circumstances) the public schools............Recently, there have been

calls to restrict speech with unpopular ideological viewpoints as “bullying” (such as anti-abortion speech and anti-gay-marriage speech). In the name of preventing “bullying,” Minnesota legislators have pushed an unconstitutionally vague, overbroad, and viewpoint-discriminatory ban on speech in public schools and in private schools that receive state funds. That bill would ban certain speech that denies students a “supportive environment” as bullying. Its ambiguity and subjectivity violate the First Amendment.

“Workplace bullying” activists want to impose broad definitions of bullying at the expense of free speech and allow employers to be held liable for damages for such speech in lawsuits, even though the First Amendment limits the government’s ability to regulate speech in private workplaces. Activists claim bullying is an “epidemic” and a “pandemic.” But in reality, the rate of bullying has steadily diminished in the nation’s schools.

Editor's Note: I would like to draw attention to David Kupelian’s book, “The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised As Freedom”.  The book description states: Americans have come to tolerate, embrace and even champion many things that would have horrified their parents' generation-from easy divorce and unrestricted abortion-on-demand to extreme body piercing and teaching homosexuality to grade-schoolers. Does that mean today's Americans are inherently more morally confused and depraved than previous generations? Of course not, says veteran journalist David Kupelian. But they have fallen victim to some of the most stunningly brilliant and compelling marketing campaigns in modern history.

The Marketing of Evil reveals how much of what Americans once almost universally abhorred has been packaged, perfumed, gift-wrapped and sold to them as though it had great value. Highly skilled marketers, playing on our deeply felt national values of fairness, generosity and tolerance, have persuaded us to embrace as enlightened and noble that which all previous generations since America's founding regarded as grossly self-destructive-in a word, evil.