From what I can remember, folks back in the colonies were imprisoned for complaining about what the king was doing.
It’s good you know the Constitution. The 5 freedoms question I’ve been asking is a type of test I’ve been running to see how bad things really are.
The fact that I can’t find anyone (outside of FR) who can correctly answer the question is frightening.
“From what I can remember, folks back in the colonies were imprisoned for complaining about what the king was doing.”
That’s kinda my point. How does free speech not cover that? Petitions would be nice as well, but since the government can say “[raspberry!]” just as easily as it can to any other form of speech, was it really necessary to include it in the Constititution.
What does it officially require the government to do, anyway? Glance at it for at least 2.5 seconds before pitching it in the trash. You can say that if we have the right to petition the government we can damn the government for ignoring us. But can’t we do that with speech and assembly alone?
I have actually asked that same question to a few people. Most get 3: Press, Religion and Speech (or is that 4?). I asked my son after his civics class and he came up with 4, missed the assembly one, but got the redress of greivances one. I was surprised. He did pretty good on a off-the-top-of-my-head amendments quiz, too. So maybe there is hope after all.
Of course, if I am talking to myself, you already know all of this. :)
“From what I can remember, folks back in the colonies were imprisoned for complaining about what the king was doing.”
To clarify, I realize the right to petitition was one of those old rights that had been around for a while and was very meaningful to people. One of the reasons that compelled us to seperation as expressed in the Declaration was that King George didn’t listen to petitions for redress of grievance.