Seth Brown: Freedom of speech protects your right to criticize me

Posted Sunday, January 18, 2015 2:03 pm

NORTH ADAMS >> Before the end of this column, I will break the law.

First, however, I would like to discuss what happens when you leave a Georgia cobbler outside overnight in January: Freeze peach.

People tend to have strong opinions about free speech; I am very much for it. If you are against it, I disagree with you, but I will always support your right to make public arguments opposing me, because see previous sentence. That's why free speech is the fundamental right, since it's hard to debate rights if you can't talk about them. If only the founding fathers had thought of that, it probably would have been the first thing they added to amend the Constitution.

A common misconception people have is to think that free speech means not being criticized and facing consequences. On the contrary, if I use my column to proclaim my contempt and hatred for spiders, Visigoths and people named Bob, when the inevitable letters pour in declaring me an idiot, I cannot claim "free speech" as some sort of immunity. (Or I can, but it will just prove those letters right.)

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Indeed, the whole point of free speech is that I am allowed to express ideas people might not like, but that they are then allowed to point out that my ideas are terrible. Being criticized for what you say is part of free speech. The threat to free speech is when people are prevented from saying things in the first place, and sadly there have been too many examples of that recently.

You may have heard about the movie "The Interview" about Kim Jong-un receiving death threats to keep it out of theatres. And terrorists murdered the staff of the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo to prevent their satirical drawings of Muhammed from being seen. (In addition to being morally horrifying, this turned out to be incredibly stupid, as many millions of people have now seen these cartoons who otherwise would have never heard of Charlie Hebdo.)

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But as tragic as that event was, these examples were assaults on free speech carried out by extremist individuals, not government policy. Cartoonists in France were murdered last week, but France supports free speech and Charlie Hebdo put out another edition soon after the tragedy, continuing their speech as protected by their government.

The biggest threat to free speech comes from entire governments whose policy is censorship. There's Turkey, the country which leads the list for imprisoning journalists. Or Russia, which avoids that list because a high number of journalists during Putin's tenure have died in coincidental homicides. Or Saudi Arabia, who started the year off with the public flogging of a blogger imprisoned 10 years for merely discussing religion.

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Naturally, as a columnist and humorist, I'm glad to live in a country that values free speech. Even though it's offensive to some, I have the right to say things like "I contumeliously reproach the Holy Ghost; also the part of the bible where bears maul some kids for insulting a bald guy is ridiculous."

But there are some places where that would be illegal. As it turns out, one of those places is Massachusetts where I live, and Chapter 272 Section 36 of the Massachusetts General Laws, specifically says that for my previous statement I can be punished by up to a year of jail time.

So if you come to visit, please bring cobbler.

Seth Brown is an award-winning humor columnist, author of "From God To Verse", and has nothing against people named Bob but is still wary of spiders. His website is RisingPun.com.