Posted on 05/09/2019 4:51:42 PM PDT by conservative98
A Florida man who was arrested for refusing to remove a sticker on his car that read ‘I eat --‘ had all charges dropped against him on Thursday, officials said.
Dillon Shane Webb, 23, was informed by state prosecutors that the evidence against him does not warrant prosecution and Webb has a valid defense under the First Amendment.
“[The deputy] overstepped his boundaries by asking me to remove the sticker,” Webb told The Post on Thursday. “I want people to see that police officers are not above the law.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
But the left runs around with pussy hats as if they are decorated with intelligence
lol
Are there any other expressions of our 1st Amendment rights that you would like to see criminalized?
Regards,
fyi: Florida agrees with you...
:)
Oh boy. More women and children affected. Good grief. This is a great win for freedom. Do I like the sticker? Nope. But freedom won tonight and that’s what matters.
It improves gas mileage by 20%. Also improves power since the vehicle has “balls.”
;-)
Try ordering a personalized plate from the DMV that reads “F-— YOU.” They won’t give it to you. Why not? Would you guys allow it on 1st amendment grounds? If not, why not?
For me, the same reasons for disallowing a F-— YOU license plate also apply to a F-— YOU bumper sticker. The public has a right to drive on public streets without being forced to read your profanity. I’m wouldn’t jail someone for a F-— YOU bumper sticker but I would restrict their driver’s license and/or vehicle registration. Operating a motor vehicle on public streets isn’t a right. It’s a privilege. There is no constitutional right to driver’s license or vehicle registration. Your right to be obscene doesn’t extend to the motor vehicle that you use on public streets.
“Why can’t similar standards be applied to images and messages displayed in public places”
Because CA and MA would arrest people for obscene “MAGA” hats.
Absurd you say? Kids have been expelled from achool for Trump clothing ina manner that was clearly an abuse of power.
Look what Twitter and Facebook do to conservatives where there is no first amendment protection.
Liberals are tyrants. They abuse any power given them. Hence why there must be bright line, no discretion rules. They can’t handle anything.
And hence why this was a bad arrest.
See my post above.
Just as conservatives are being debanked and blocked from PayPal, we’d be blocked from driving too.
Liberals are tyrants. They cannot be trusted with the discretion you seek to give them.
“IMO, incorrect. ALL Rights are UNLIMITED;”
Sorry. You are just wrong. It’s that simple. I won’t sugar coat it. Educate yourself more before interjecting an uninformed opinion.
Here’s a good example:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-290.ZO.html
From Justice Scalia’s Opinion of the Court in Heller:
“There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms. Of course the right was not unlimited, just as the First Amendment’s right of free speech was not, see, e.g., United States v. Williams, 553 U. S. ___ (2008). Thus, we do not read the Second Amendment to protect the right of citizens to carry arms for any sort of confrontation, just as we do not read the First Amendment to protect the right of citizens to speak for any purpose. Before turning to limitations upon the individual right, however, we must determine whether the prefatory clause of the Second Amendment comports with our interpretation of the operative clause.”
Perhaps where you are confused is in the difference between enumerated versus unenumerated rights. We all have natural rights regardless of whether they have been specified in the Constitution or codified into law. The right to protect one’s self is such a right. It is the basis for the enumerated right to bear arms. There are also positive and negative rights. A negative right is one which imposes on others the duty to NOT interfere. For example, our right to be secure in our persons, possessions, etc. implies that others, such as the police, have the duty to leave us alone without probable cause.
“Please, define ‘obscene, indecent, a/o profane’, considering. Just as this thread points out, it’s arbitrary to the individual.”
Again, read up. The difficulty in defining certain restrictions on speech did not begin in this thread. It is an issue that has been tackled by the Supreme Court repeatedly. We rely on such rulings, as well as the letter of the law, to determine what applies and when.
So, for example, whether something is obscene should be evaluated with landmark decisions, like Miller v. California, in mind. Previously the legal standard had been, “utterly without socially redeeming value” but was changed to the more specific three-pronged test based on whether a work has “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value”.
The Miller test, as it is called, has three parts for testing if a “work” is obscene:
1. Whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards”, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
2. Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
3. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
The work is considered obscene ONLY when all three conditions are apply.
Keep in mind that the issue in the article referenced in this thread is NOT prohibited based on obscenity, but can be regulated based on the lower standard of indecency. This has to do with public interest as well as community standards. There is a public interest in protecting children, for example.
Indecent “speech” (which modern legal standards whether improper or not include many things outside of speech such as art) is protected speech but has limits because other people have the right not to be forced to listen to someone else’s speech.
Obscenity is NOT protected by law and is in fact prosecutable. Child pornography is an example. In fact, that is about the only thing that has been prosecuted since Bill Clinton quit enforcing these laws. Technically, pornography that shows penetration and crosses state lines could be prosecuted even for possession. Due to non-enforcement pornography is rampant. But pornography is not generally protected speech under the Constitution regardless of what the ACLU would have us all believe. Likewise, censorship is also not unconstitutional.
In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the free speech protection of the Ohio Constitution, which was substantially similar to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, did not extend to motion pictures. This was overturned (also in a unanimous decision) in Burstyn v. Wilson (1952) in which movies began to be treated as protected “speech”.
The basis for the 1952 decision was that such censorship constituted “prior restraint”. It did not absolve the medium from legal consequences of the content of the films. So, for example, a film producer still can be sued for defamation. A film cannot be forced to get approval by censor boards before being exhibited except on the limited basis of obscenity laws. Apart from this, stopping a film from being shown requires an injunction by a court of law. This might be obtained, for example, if it could be demonstrated that the distributor or producer did not have authorization of the actual owner of the intellectual property (as in a film being an unauthorized adaptation of a copyrighted play).
One of the biggest failures on the part of the courts and Congress with regards to the propagation of indecency in the film industry lies primarily in the allowing of intellectual property rights to be extended to indecent works. Free speech does not necessarily mean the right to enjoy intellectual property right protection in order to profit from said speech. IP is not a natural right but is a Constitutional power of Congress for the explicit purpose: “To promote the progress of science and useful arts.”
Based upon his advertised diet, I think that he could easily get away with that.
You presume I care what a black-robed oligarch, SUPPOSEDLY of the “conservative” wing, *decrees* about MY inalienable Rights (when, like ALL govt, they elevate themselves above those they supposedly ‘represent’).
Judicial activism via personal belief/opinion has ZERO bearing vs. Law and the PLAIN English of the Constitution.
“...shall NOT be infringed.” has Z-E-R-O ‘wiggle room’, as does “Congress shall make NO law” yet, time and time again, these (whom OPINIONS you seem to believe matter) decree don’t mean the words that are written.
Shove that high opinion in yourself, and your tyrants, where it appears your head is already planted.
“Because CA and MA would arrest people for obscene ‘MAGA’ hats.”
First, no one treated this case as obscenity. It is indecency. It may be protected speech but has limits when it comes to public display.
I reject that it is unreasonable to prohibit the public display of profanity on the basis of protecting children and on the basis that some people do not want to be forced to listen to it or look at it.
If CA and MA cannot tell the difference between indecent speech and political speech, perhaps they do not belong in the union.
“And hence why this was a bad arrest.”
I disagree. Regardless, the court took your side. It is what it is. I’ll pick my battles. So will the police.
But as far as I am concerned, when I see someone walking around Walmart with a big F-bomb printed on his t-shirt, I consider it disturbing the peace. I think communities can and should be able to set standards without infringing on Constitutional free speech such as a red MAGA ball cap.
I think the courts need to consider whether the place something is displayed is primarily a place intended for all people or is primarily for adults or even whether the place has specific uses. For example, a park for kids might use one set of standards, while a public lake might have another, and a university campus another. If we can regulate speech when it comes to defamation, copyright infringement, terroristic threats, and other cases, I think we can also regulate community standards of decency rather than having federal courts decide to override the desire of local communities.
The right to associate with people of your own choosing is also Constitutional. This has implications when it comes to community standards that may not necessarily align with those of the 9th circuit or the Washington beltway.
Fortunately smarter and wiser people than you understand the tyrants we face.
“You presume I care what a black-robed oligarch, SUPPOSEDLY of the ‘conservative’ wing, *decrees* about MY inalienable Rights (when, like ALL govt, they elevate themselves above those they supposedly ‘represent’.”
So, to you, Scalia was a “black-robed oligarch”? Got it.
Might as well tattoo “fool” on your forehead. You don’t have to do anything I tell you, and you don’t have to learn from the FACTS I took the time to share. But what you MUST do is take your consequences. They are certainly coming.
If a person gets his feelings hurt easily and does not like being treated like a fool, he should abstain from acting like one.
You are NOT siding with conservatism or gun rights. Complete ignorance and blathering about something the speaker is completely ignorant about does not further the cause of second amendment rights. And this is why I told you to LEARN.
“Shove that high opinion in yourself, and your tyrants, where it appears your head is already planted.”
Tyrants? I quoted Scalia. You just prove I was far too polite in my earlier response. Some people can’t handle when someone disagrees with their ill-conceived ideas and opinions. This is usually a characteristic of leftists. They don’t reason. They just emote. But that is exactly how you are handling having your very wrong opinions corrected with facts.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
You started this dialogue by critiquing my assertion that all rights have limits. You based your argument on what? Your words were “IMO”. In other words, you just pulled the idea out of your... wherever. You provided no historical information, no authoritative source, no body of knowledge. You did not cite Blackwell or any founder. You simply blurted out your opinion that I was wrong and that all rights were unlimited. Do you even know what you are saying? Confidence and incompetence are a very bad combination. A person needs to know what they don’t know, rather than pretending to be an expert in things they obviously know nothing about.
Your attitude is very likely to lead to your self-destruction. I don’t have to guess. I already know what will happen, based on experience. You will be the victim of your own stubborn pride. Perhaps you’ll try putting an officer of the law or a judge in his or her place, and you will discover you should have listened. Ignorance is no excuse. Willful ignorance is far worse.
Since you have asserted that all rights are UNLIMITED and want to unleash your vitriol against someone trying to help you correct your extreme error of judgement, are you going to get some machine guns and hand grenades and parade them in public to let everyone know that your right to bear arms is unlimited?
If so, be sure to get back to us with the outcome. For the rest of us, using guns responsibly is one of the best ways to insure our rights are not infringed.
The days may be approaching when exercising our second amendment right to bear arms may be required to stop the tyrannical abuses of power by the left and their attempted theft of our republic. When and if those days come we will need well-armed patriots to fight, but what we won’t need is some reckless individuals who do not have proper respect for the responsibilities that go hand-in-hand with those rights.
“Fortunately smarter and wiser people than you understand the tyrants we face.”
So, the founders, in their wisdom, envisioned the enumerated right of free speech as a means to post any manner of vile language in public places for children to read?
And further, since I disagree with your position which absolutely must be the founders’ intent on the matter, I do not understand the threat of tyranny like you?
OK. Got it.
It’s always a useful fallback position to simply assert something like this rather than use logic, reason, or historical context to make one’s case. Or at least it is easier. But to me it’s a copout.
Glad you understand the short sightedness of your position.
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