Have We Forgotten What Freedom of Speech Is?

"The Founding Fathers established the First Amendment to protect two forms of speech: political and religious. Yet in a typically perverse irony of our time, these blameless exercises of the First Amendment are regarded as 'shocking' violations of it while a growing culture of obscenity not protected by the framers receives its imprimatur. ... It would be difficult to come up with a more blatant violation of the First Amendment than the McCain-Feingold idiocy now accorded the utmost respect in our political culture. ...

Notice that both campaigns respond to ads by calling for their suppression -- a revealing measure of McCain-Feingold's straightforward silencing of political speech. Calls to suppress free speech would once have been politically dangerous. Now they are standard fare in the culture of McCain-Feingold which allows those with power to define the rules for its challenge, rigging the game in favor of established pols at the expense of individuals. The media, happy to go along with the silencing of the citizenry as that means their power increases, cast the suppression of free speech, a move they wouldn't tolerate in any other context, as 'reform.'

The destruction of the real purposes of the First Amendment is complete when pols can dignify obscenities with the name of free speech while treating 'issue ads' as intolerable obscenities worth punishing with jail time." --George Neumayr