“You’ll never be able to legally maintain Constitutional Free Speech on any Internet Forum.”
You really seem to hate those straw men, the way you keep knocking them down! Nobody, and I mean Nobody here, is saying they have an enforceable 1st amendment right to comment on Huffpo or on the NYT website.
You are aware that the concept of free speech does exist outside of a constitutional law argument, aren’t you? We are in an ethics discussion, not a law discussion. We are discussion whether popular science SHOULD allow comments, not whether they MUST. See?
What we appreciate as conservatives is the right of control that we do have, under the law, of various kinds of property. An Internet forum is one such kind of property.
Now we also appreciate free speech, but that of Constitutional free speech and not the kind of free speech that some have in mind of telling an owner of a site that he has to allow speech that he wants nothing to do with. That’s not the free speech that conservatives are talking about.
The kind of free speech that we’re talking about (on Internet forums) is one in which each owner can control his forum any way he sees fit, according to his own philosophy (and also according to the law).
AND THEN ... if someone sees that their viewpoint and philosophy is not being heard on any forum (or not allowed) — this person knows that we are ALL ALLOWED UNDER LAW to create a new forum and set it up ANY WAY WE SEE FIT.