Government’s job is to protect our lives and liberties. But how best to accomplish this? Should books be banned? Websites blocked?
Diane Feinstein thinks so.
Sen. Feinstein (D-California) wants to ban The Anarchist Cookbook from the Internet. The book, which came out in 1971 with lots of radical ideas, including notoriously unreliable instructions for making bombs, is now a website. Perhaps the quality of the “cookbook” has helped us survive against the anarchist threat these last five decades.
Today, the threat is not anarchist but Islamist terrorism. So of course Sen. Feinstein also wants the Al Qaida magazine Inspire “off the Internet.”
Government censorship, anyone? Free speech, Senator?
Now, I don’t approve of the bombing and murdering of innocents for any cause. So I am not at one with deadly anarchists or deadly jihadists. Count me as among their enemies.
But, at the risk of being called a “liberal,” I don’t think we should defend ourselves against anarchists or jihadists or other terrorists just any old way. For both moral and strategic reasons, we ought not be killing innocents by drone strike, along with those simply declared guilty, without any lawful process at all.
Likewise, we ought not abridge our own cherished principles and the rule of law.
Including the First Amendment.
After all, that’s what government is supposed to be protecting in the first place.
The fact that Feinstein seems so comfortable with simply “banning” books and magazines and websites suggests an illiberal, unAmerican attitude. An attitude that threatens to do more damage to the homeland than any “cookbook” or pro-terrorist magazine or website ever will.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
3 replies on “Feinstein No Einstein”
The foolish and their rights are quickly parted. The rights accorded the worst are all that are possessed by Ms Fienstien.
She is a pragmatic and populist with no principle, paving the road to hell.
Yes, censorship is wrong.
But, it is also stupid to place pornography in front of immature minds, or any minds for that matter.
So, the issue is how to protect fragile minds from terrorist’s crap?! Seduction of the weak minded is wrong too.
Answers please.
Better to let 100 guilty go free than hang one innocent.
Freedom of speech is an American right and one the the government is restricted from restricting.
The Constitution doesn’t protect the speech of foreign nationals from the US government.