If he violated his parole, he'll be back in jail. That doesn't change the fact of freedom of expression, even when it's ugly. The Watts riots weren't about insults to a person dead many 100s of years, or even insults to a living person/s, it was a reaction discrimination and violence against people in the present.
The Stonewall riots didn't happen because of insults, they happened because of police abuse and laws restricting the freedom the lgbt people. If we rioted over insults, we wouldn't get much else done. Someone makes a new movie about the evils of lgbts and how we're disgusting to God, I'd hope the mass of Americans would vote with their wallet and let the movie wilt in obscurity, but I wouldn't wish to deny the person the right to make the film. If the person stood before a crowd and urged them to go out right then and bash a gay? That's when it crosses a line to promoting violence, and that's a line the Supreme Court has drawn.
The Supreme Court has made pretty clear what the standard is for violation of that right and the movie doesn't rise to that by any measure.
My caring about this issue does mean I don't care about the one you mention. It's not an either/or thing. I spend rather a lot of time on the issue of voting rights, which is one of the biggest issues, imo, right now, and not dealt with enough, again imo. That's a reason I get annoyed with groups yelling about not voting and it doesn't matter and things like that. Most the groups saying such things are from white well-off backgrounds. The consequences to them are minimal regardless of how an election goes.
And we're not given the right to freedom of expression, it's understood as an inalienable right. |
