A short summary of modern First Amendment jurisprudence

Via Best of the Web

National Review blogress Kathryn Lopez notes this passage from Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent, which sums matters up nicely:

Who could have imagined that the same Court which, within the past four years, has sternly disapproved of restrictions upon such inconsequential forms of expression as virtual child pornography, tobacco advertising, dissemination of illegally intercepted communications, and sexually explicit cable programming, would smile with favor upon a law that cut to the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect: the right to criticize the government.

This wonderfully encapsulates the perversity at the heart of contemporary American liberalism: "Free speech," in this view, protects everything except actual political speech. And of course we're all familiar with variants of this argument, such as: Criticizing anti-American speech is censorship, while censoring conservative speech is mere criticism. Or: It's un-American to criticize people who side with America's enemies; indeed, as "dissenters," they are the true patriots. It's mind-boggling that this sort of nonsense gets taken seriously.

And don't forget that in a world of the destruction of families, teens who commit mass murder, deadly sexually transmitted disease and a plague of teenage pregnancies unstaunched by sex education or the removal of taboos on prophylactics, the Boy Scouts are a "hate group" that needs to be marginalized by municipal governments.

It is perverse. The First Amendment wasn't established to protect porn or public subsidies for anti-religious bigotry. It was intended to protect our right to complain about our political rulers and to marshall support prior to elections to throw the rascals out. But we were told that we there was a "slippery slope." We were told that we had to avoid chilling free speech. We were told that we had to protect the pornographers in order to create a wide breathing area for our fragile First Amendment protections.

We've clearly been sold a bill of goods about the necessity of protecting porn and the slippery slope.

Update: Jonah Goldberg is dead right with this observation:

We used to protect core rights by protecting peripheral rights. We'd say, "Sure, you have the right to smear your naked body with chocolate in the middle of Main Street," because we figured, so long as that sort of asininity is protected, our most vital freedoms will surely be secured. But now our freedoms are rotting from the inside out. As Justice Scalia noted in his dissent, the court in the last four years alone has protected such "speech" as kiddy and cable porn, but it now finds direct criticism of politicians during an election to be deserving of regulation.

By the way, where the hell is this much-vaunted blogosphere? If three freshman congressmen from Wisconsin hinted that they wanted to regulate the use of umlauts on the internet in honor of Leif Ericson's birthday, bloggers would be on the steps of Congress up-ending cans of gasoline on themselves in protest at such an infringement on free speech. But here we have all three branches of the government severely restricting independent speech outside of the dinosaurs of Old Media and the relative silence — minus a few noble exceptions (The Volokh conspiracy, Instapundit) — is deafening.

And I say, what the hell is going on with our society? We passively allow the government to regulate speech about the government during the height of political campaigns because the feelings of career politicians might be hurt. We passively allow the government to canonize bullshit post-modernism as a science and not a murmur is heard.

Jonah's correct, our rights are rotting from the inside out.