> Why defend them?
Because a depressingly large percentage of people would actually like to see the first amendment overturned.
Because a depressingly large percentage of people would actually like to see the first amendment overturned.
Only one side is afraid of open debate and pure freedom of speech. Why could that be?
Yes. Restrictions on what teachers are allowed to teach are restrictions on freedom of speech. Restrictions on non-sexual drag performances are restrictions of freedom of speech. Bans on calling for boycotts of Israeli goods and services are restrictions of the freedom of speech.
That goes double when we are talking about public employees whose conduct is directly the function of law.
In other words: you're allowed to restrict the speech of other people as long as you own private property. Turns out that freedom of speech in a liberal "democracy" is not all it's cracked up to be.
You are, of course, free to not take on the burden of employment from a particular organization if you find their demands on your conduct while they are compensating you for your time to be unacceptable.
This relationship is purely transactional. And, sorry, the idea that this is actually a bona fide problem is facile.
Liberal society loves to characterise itself as a rigid, well-structured system in which individuals choose to make idealised rational decisions to work towards their own interests. As opposed to emotional reasoning, which is conveniently implied to be the diametrical opposite of rational thought. And I call it "convenient" because as a result can easily paint protests and strikes, as "irrational" and "despicable" actions perpetrated by "unreasonable" individuals.
However, as soon as one considers the fact that the disparity of power between people with private property and people without makes it so that the people without private property cannot afford to make decisions on a "rational vacuum". We quickly find ourselves reverting back to "what are you going to do about it? You don't work, you don't eat."
However speech in the classroom is within the scope of your job duties. So my employer should not be able to fire me for wearing a Trump or Biden sticker off the clock, but it is fair to prohibit me from wearing it whilst on the job, and to sanction me if I'm proselytizing to customers during my duties
Do you consider a curriculum to be a restriction on freedom of speech? I ask as a genuine question - being from the UK the norm for me is having a national curriculum and standard testing (albeit it executed by private-but-certified exam boards). It seems like common sense to me that obviously teachers have restrictions on what they can say in a classroom. Any employee does within their workplace and job duties, but teaching is one profession where I'd clearly expect a much higher level of restriction (along with the police, who represent the state, and doctors, who have duties of professionalism and to give medical advice only in line with the regulator, and various other regulated roles)
Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman would like a word.
This was also a time when the majority (>50%) of Americans disapproved of mixed-race relationships, according to Gallup. That percentage only fell below 50% in 1993, IIRC.
Do you claim those are not censorship?
I'm not taking a side here. Government censorship is bad. Full stop.
These are limited to the government itself. The "don't say gay," bill makes it illegal for teachers to teach sexual related stuff to elementary school kids. It's a form of self-governing (no pun intended) and isn't restricting the rights of citizens, which the first amendment protects. It's restricting what the government itself can do. Book bans are also limited to what the school library may carry and doesn't apply to public libraries or book stores and the like.
>requiring medical professionals to spout specific claims about the "harms" of pregnancy termination and a raft of other stuff too.
This is technically compelled speech rather than censorship. It's another concept I'm not overly comfortable with. To be fair, it's compelling a licensed physician to do this when performing his or her profession, which the government (and the people) has chosen to regulate. A physician wouldn't be compelled to do this outside his or her practicing medicine.
I think framing this as being about speech with which one disagrees, or finds repugnant, is a bit disingenuous. It omits consideration of the possibility of speech that is genuinely harmful. For a few examples:
- My friends and I decide it'd be cool to put you in jail, so we report you as committing a serious crime that you didn't, and all give matching testimony that leads to your conviction.
- Pfizer starts selling a new drug that cures cancer. Except it turns out that they completely fabricated all the studies showing its effect, and actually the pills are nothing but placebos.
- A mugger with his hand in his pocket stops you at night and says, "Give me your wallet or I'll shoot you." You give him your wallet and he leaves.
I hope you would agree that these situations are... not ideal, and that the law should be able to discourage them. Despite the fact that all of these are, indisputably, speech.
Sure, I didn't mean to suggest that those things are legal. Just giving a few examples of speech that is harmful, rather than merely distasteful.
> The government would not have to intervene asking for censorship in any of these cases.
Hm, I think that may be pinning quite a lot on some questionable definition of "censorship."
In these examples the law would be banning some specific speech from me, Pfizer, and the mugger, and punishing us if we engaged in that banned speech anyway. Isn't that what censorship is?
That's the whole point: fraud, perjury, and several other harmful things are subcategories of speech.
The day's not over until you've been called a communist groomer and a Nazi.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...
If it was, we wouldn’t need the preliminary in preliminary injunction, the standards for which balance the likelihood of success on the merits with the kinds of impacts the action sougjt to enjoin would have on the situation of the parties, so a greater and/or more difficult to undo impact requires a lesser probability of success to be sufficiently likely to warrant an injunction.
This was to say the injunction is not completely on a whim, agreed on everything else you wrote.
It is mostly meta evidence - statements about what evidence will show at trial. Which assumes it's valid and admissible and actually shows that and ....
In this case, this isn't on a whim but I wouldn't say it's on the evidence either - especially given the consistent misquotes.
They were not particularly diplomatic on the evidence part: "Additionally, the Court’s conclusion that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment claims fails to properly apply state-action doctrine and ignores the voluminous evidence presented by Defendants that contradicts Plaintiffs’ conclusory allegations."
There are even plenty of times they get issued and dissolved days later.
This is a "preliminary injunction" (PI). A PI is a different phase of the case. Granting a PI is extremely an significant and consequential action by the judge. Think about it this way-- if the judge is right and conservative voices were suppressed-- the PI has the potential to change the political landscape in which the legal challenge occurs. So, in addition to the judge signaling that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed in getting permanent relief, in the meantime the judge also is tipping the playing field in their favor to undo the irremediable harms that are the subject of the litigation.
PI's exist to maintain status quo. It's not that interesting. What evidence standards are used also varies a lot (some courts only use admissible evidence, some do not).
In this case, it will likely be overturned on standing grounds, for example, fairly quickly, if not other grounds.
It has tons of problems everywhere. On standing, for example, it clearly ignores binding supreme court precedent - the court decided, with basically no discussion of why, the states have parens patriae standing to sue on behalf of their citizens in cases like this, but they literally do not, and haven't forever (going back >100 years). I expect this will be raised almost instantly in the request for a stay.
Actually, i just found the stay request, they already filed it:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.18...
"This Court concluded that Plaintiff States have standing under a parens patriae theory despite the Supreme Court’s clear statement that “[a] State does not have standing as parens patriae to bring an action against the Federal Government.” Alfred L. Snapp & Son, Inc. v. Puerto Rico, 458 U.S. 592 (1982); Haaland v. Brackeen, 143 S. Ct. 1609, 1640 (2023)."
"The Court also held that all Plaintiffs have standing despite their failure to present any evidence of ongoing or imminent harm. See Attala Cnty., Miss. Branch of NAACP v. Evans, 37 F.4th 1038, 1042 (5th Cir. 2022). Additionally, the Court’s conclusion that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment claims fails to properly apply state-action doctrine and ignores the voluminous evidence presented by Defendants that contradicts Plaintiffs’ conclusory allegations."
I don't think this injunction is gonna stand very long.