Free Speech

Did you know that I have a pet cause? Normally, I don’t go in much for charity, being a selfish jerk. I mean, I’ll do the occasional walkathon for the March of Dimes, but that's really more because I like walking than anything else. Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favor of birth defects, but I wasn't really driven to go on these walks because I was distraught over the poor little babies either.

Likewise, I participate in the odd book drive, partly because I do want libraries to have all the books they can handle. I've read many library books, and I hate to think of a kid in a library not being able to find anything to read. But, honestly, there's also an element of wanting to see my name on other people's websites. So I have a hard time classifying that as, strictly speaking, pure charity.

However, I do have one cause that I take very, very seriously: free speech. Now, when I say "free," I mean "completely unregulated by the government." If you have any questions about what I think should be allowed, I direct you to the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. And that includes printed material and pretty much any other form of expression you can think of; I believe that one of the most important Supreme Court decisions ever was Hustler Magazine and Larry C. Flynt v. Falwell, because it explicitly affirmed the right of parody to be protected. I have had occasion to refer to that decision in my life, especially when I worked on the humor newspaper in college and we got picketed fairly regularly.

And I'd like to emphasize that I also want to protect speech I disagree with. Frankly, I disagree with some element of almost everything people say, especially if it's political in nature. But highly-charged political debates are exactly what must be protected most. Even stupid, ill-informed yahoos get their say, and if the "right" people can't argue them down and show why they're wrong, that's too bad.

To let you know just how extreme I am on this point, I don't even think explicitly obscene speech (or movies) should be regulated. However, I do have a clever idea that I think would abolish the pornography industry in a couple of months. What you do is, first you allow all porn that involves only adults (because minors can't give informed consent). Allow it all. And then, you pull copyright protection from obscene or pornographic materials. Because even the craziest, most inventively filthy videos start with an FBI warning saying essentially "Don't steal this and put it on the Internet for free."

This plan would have a couple quick effects: first, it would save the government money, both in obscenity law enforcement and in copyright enforcement. And the big porn studios would quickly find that their work was being bootlegged all over the country, and they'd discover that it's unprofitable. There'd still be some porn produced, mostly "specialty market" stuff, or people who are just really, really exhibitionistic. But the big monolithic pornography industry (which is what I think people really object to, because that's what matches the "grab runaways, make them do horrible things, and then dump them on the streets when they're no longer 23" stereotype) would go away pretty quickly. See? I'm willing to compromise here.

So I donate money. I donate a surprising amount to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, because I get angry when some small-time comic book artist gets sued because someone doesn't like drawings of nekkid people being sold to adults. I give money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation because I've always been grateful for the work they did when Steve Jackson Games got raided. Plus, you have to admire any group that's largely funded by geeks that's willing to take the position that anti-Spam legislation will block free speech.

But for some reason, I forgot about the ACLU. Gah! What's the matter with me? The ACLU is the biggest free-speech lobby group out there! And not only that, they're doing lots of other good work, too, like swooping in to defend unpopular people at a moment's notice. Luckily, some people with a bigger sense of civic responsibility than me have started This Is Not Over, which is full of things people can do to help out their country or the world in general. And like I say, I'm not really an activist myself. Normally. But when I saw this post, it reminded me that I could be giving money to the Free Speech Giant as well as the little guys.

So I'm going to go do some good. Which, for all my protestations about laziness and slack, probably puts me ahead of the curve. That's a shame.