A people amendment
By John Marshall
“You are entitled to your opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”
– Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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Moynihan, who died in 2003, was among the keenest minds in the United States Senate, an astute politician, sociologist, statesman, prolific author, and a New York Democrat elected to four terms beginning in 1976. Before his senate service, Moynihan had been United States’ ambassador to the United Nations and to India, and was a member of four successive presidential administrations, Democratic and Republican, beginning with John F. Kennedy and continuing through Gerald Ford.
Moynihan’s quip is from a reelection campaign debate in 1994. It provides a vivid backdrop for today’s Twitter wars and Facebook clutter, new and complicated heat sources in “free speech” arguments. Today’s battle cries can be traced over two centuries back to Philadelphia, when the first debates faded and the dust settled and the United States at last had a Constitution.
From May into mid-September in 1787, the founders debated the afflictions of a weak central government under its Articles of Confederation. The new Constitution set out how America was, and is, to be governed.
Critical to that document are the initial ten amendments, a bill of rights. The First Amendment is the most publicized and often the most misunderstood.
During the Constitution’s 200th birthday in 1987 in Philadelphia, a special “Congress” was organized to celebrate the First Amendment. A poll from George Gallup had found that most Americans didn’t know what the First Amendment was.
This amendment is the one that guarantees us the right to speak our piece, to print what we like, to have meetings, to believe as we choose. All of those good things are supposed to be done without any interference, government or otherwise.
It’s a pity that the majority of Americans had never heard of such a basic law. Perhaps Gallup hadn’t asked the question the right way. Perhaps, as it seems, Americans are more aware of this law today.
The best thing to come out of both Philadelphia Congresses – the first one, and the one 200 years later – was the effort to get everyone involved. Some people still think the First Amendment was put there on behalf of people who owned newspapers or radio and television stations and that’s all. It was put there for all of us, and when it gets dented we all get hurt.
The First Amendment is a People Amendment, not a Free Press Amendment. Not altogether.
It may tick off editors when their reporters get kicked out of the state senate so members can talk privately, but the real losers are the people who pay for government services, use public facilities, send their children to public schools.
We’ve learned a lot about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment over the past two-plus centuries. Our continuing education has at times come the rough way – in bloody protests, vicious rebukes – or the litigious way, in court.
The current distortions of speech freedoms and the amendment that protects them seem to rain down from the White House and Capitol Hill and into our troubled communities. They are old torrents, and one of the best at countering them was the late Hubert Humphrey. During a Senate debate of the Voting Rights Act in1964, he delivered this retort to a segregationist:
“The right to be heard does not include the right to be taken seriously.”
Humphrey, a Democrat, died in 1978 (bladder cancer) at age 66, had served three terms in the Senate from 1949 to 1964. He was President Johnson’s vice president (1965-’69), and lost the 1968 presidential election to Richard Nixon. Humphrey was again elected to senate in 1970 and to his 5th senate term in ’76. He was a tireless talker, one to be taken seriously.
The First Amendment may acquire new angles and new technologies but its guarantee – freedom to speak, to think, to meet – remains timeless. It must resist the fakery of firebrands who tweet “fake news” at the drop of a fact just as it persevered against the goons who once incinerated newspaper offices for daring to publish the truth.
With today’s digital deluge, anything – anything at all – can be published in an instant and palmed off to the masses. The First Amendment gives us the privilege to sit back and say: Fine, but is it true?
This is how our society is to be free indeed, and not managed. We must continue to guard against efforts to distort the First Amendment or pervert its purpose, for the obvious reason that the next step is enslavement of the people.
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