Been a lotta talk about the first amendment on the media, TV and internet lately. Lotta things said, most of 'em valid. "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press." But none of them gets right down to the meat of the matter.
The meat is simple. Without the first amendment, the government can call any speech it doesn't like treasonous, blasphemous, disloyal, seditious, unAmerican, or other bad name and zap, speaker gets jailed, which shuts him up. The founders believed in democracy, by which they meant every man could speak in support of his political ideas without fear of government reprisals. And without free speech, we don't have a democracy.
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