When discussing anything there are so many places to find information so many sources that one could lose themselves searching. I think the best way to find the answer is to find out who said so!
First of all when asking a question about politics who said so is an important question, don’t you think? If we can find out who then maybe we can start to ask the right questions. The right question may be why do you say that? What do you base that off of? Will that work? How do you know? Can you show me? So what I would like to do is point you in the direction of the founding of the United States. All these questions were asked by so many during that time and how they answered is incredible. The founders were veracious readers, most of them were self taught and didn’t get very far in school. In those days school wasn’t high on the priority list, when compared to living and dying. Often boys in those days, at a very young age, were pulled out of school to go to work in the family business just to keep everyone afloat. They were forced to read to learn, and they couldn’t hop on Google to find the answer. In their reading they learned so much, they learned what they could do, and what they didn’t want to do. It is important to note here that they were all open to new ideas and old ones so what they had to do is find out what would work and how? What a complex situation they were in, if you think about it, how do we start a country was what they were considering. They knew they wanted to start something great, something that would last forever. But how could they know? How could they make the right decisions? You may be thinking did they make the right decisions look at us now. For those of us, if you’re like me, we consider what do I want to wear today? What should I have for luch today? How do I make my wife happy? Just for starters in the morning and these questions could have terrible side affects if answered incorrectly. These men were pondering how to start something so magnificent, so incredible, so. . . . well you get what I am trying to say. It blows my mind, I wonder if they slept good at night, knowing that if I had the wrong lunch I could be up half the night with gas, not to mention if I didn’t succeed in making my wife happy for the day. Think about this, up until that point in history mankind hadn’t made it that far into the future. What I mean is for thousands of years people walked around or rode on animals to get where they were going. They didn’t really have money, not like you and I have today, to purchase things. They didn’t have a way to communicate, they didn’t have medicine, they didn’t even have much hope of not getting sick and dying. What the founders created was a way for mankind in the United States to make a gigantic leap forward you could say a leap that would span all of time before it, to get where we are today. Consider this, if we moved the founding of the United Sates a thousand years back we could have, what we have now, but seven hundred years ago. How incredible! But I got ahead of myself. We were talking about what the founders had to consider and the weight of their choices. Consider freedom…that seems important.
Freedom: should we be, or shouldn’t we be free? The founders, along with many others in those days, didn’t consider themselves free people because England ruled the Americans at that time. England didn’t have much to do with the Americans, it put a few taxes in place, a few tariffs, and sent some troops in to make their presence known and that was about it. Arguably there were a few more things, but for the sake of this writing we shall keep it short. To you and me in this day in age we might welcome something like that. But the founders refused, they wanted genuine freedom. The freedom to choose, to make mistakes, to get it right. Without someone else, mainly the crown, scolding them or taking credit for what they got right. So because of this, some of the people of that time decided to fight for freedom. What is freedom anyway? Perhaps we could talk about that now. Think about “what is freedom”? Did you come up with an answer? Stop reading and ask someone “what is freedom” it’s a complex question isn’t it? Do you have freedom? Are you free to do what you wish right now? Some may say they are, some may say they aren’t. But still the question remains, perhaps I should be more specific, after all the question was very broad. Are you free to do as you wish right now? If you are like most of us the answer is no, “I am not free to do as I wish because I have responsibilities” one might say. Those responsibilities may be chosen or, in some cases, may have been thrust upon us by some decision that when we made. When we made that decision, we were not considering the “responsibilities” that would follow. But that is not what I mean, I mean are you free to make your own choices? Right now we are hearing a lot about the freedom of things, the freedom of speech comes to mind. Are we free to say what we want? The founders discussed all of this and how they wanted a country where one could say what they wanted because of the freedoms we possessed. There were, of course, still countries where you are certainly not free to say what you want; one could get killed for saying certain things. So where does the “freedom of speech” come from. Well as I mentioned before if we point to the founding of the United States we learn that this freedom is a gift from God, or as the founders put it, “an unalienable right endowed by our creator.” That sounds like serious stuff but what did they mean. In the founders writings you can find many times where they discussed rights that were endowed by our creator. They believed that certain “rights” or natural laws, as they put it, didn’t really have to be defined because they all agreed that these rights were just that, a right. “Meaning that no one could take them away without doing so forcefully and if one did attempt to, they were going against the creator, God. In the founder’s minds, going against God was something no one wanted to do. This is why the constitution starts by saying, “certain unalienable rights”. How did they come to this conclusion? You guessed it, from reading. In this case, the Bible was their book of choice, but also because they knew that to be free you just couldn’t take that away. Why, you may ask, hopefully you ask, because they knew what it was like to not have that freedom. As in many cases one will create something because they knew they didn’t like the way it was. Consider parenting. But what was free to be said? Could one say anything? Only if it didn’t infringe on other inalienable rights. Some of those rights are life, liberty, property, and so forth. Hopefully this sheds some light on freedom of speech. At least to what it was originally intended to be. We have come so far from those days and so many things have changed, is this right still available or should it be? The answer is, of course, up too you the reader but consider this we have so many examples of when it didn’t and one great example of when it did. Would you prefer to live in a country that created what we have now, or in one where you could be killed for saying certain things.
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