Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!husc6!rutgers!att!chinet!patrick
From: patrick@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick A. Townson)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: Freedom of hate
Message-ID: <8200@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 12 Apr 89 05:01:32 GMT
References: <14130@gryphon.COM> <8132@chinet.chi.il.us> <1216@frog.UUCP>
Reply-To: patrick@chinet.chi.il.us (Patrick A. Townson)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 147

In article <1216@frog.UUCP> john@frog.UUCP (John Woods) writes:

>Oh, you mean Mr. Verity had a group of campus policemen blackjack this fool
>down at Campus Police headquarters in a windowless room?  Or did Mr. Verity
>simply have the Penn State army shoot him?  Perhaps he let him off easy, and
>just locked the toad in his dorm room and announced that anyone talking with
>him would be arrested? 

No, he simply unlawfully and unconstitutionally refused to allow him to
participate in a forum maintained on government owned computing machinery
at a government owned facility on the basis of a speech that he made. 

>--> GET A CLUE: <--  Governments have powers to
>prevent any discussion of ideas, any time, anywhere.

Not the United States government, or by extension, the government of the
states of the United States. They don't have that authority. I suppose
one could argue that they have the power, through the military, if they
wished to do it that way. But I thionk its safe to say our government has
no authority to squelch discussion of ideas at any time.


>Mr. Verity simply
>enforced Penn State's right not to pay for someone's odious behavior.

Are you forgetting that Mr. Verity is employed by the government of the state
of Pennsylvania? He is employed to help maintain a *government owned*
facility where historically a forum has been permitted to take place, and
where qualified participants have been permitted to speak?

Odious or not, see three paragraphs above: the government cannot bar someone
from making a speech. Now had Whitehead followed up on his speech with some
actual murder or other violence or whatever, then he can be stopped.

>> If the American Nazis can go to the village of Skokie with the blessings
>> of a federal judge and the ACLU has the nerve to blanket it in free speech
>
>Because the government of Skokie did not have the Constitutional authority
>to prevent these odious people from expressing their ideas in public in
>a peaceable assembly.  Had they decided to do so on someone's lawn instead
>of the public street they could have been driven off with gunfire if needed.

And like the government of Skokie, the government of Pennsylvania, and its
authorized representatives do not have the constitutional authority to 
prevent people from expressing their ideas in public in a peaceable
assembly. Had Whitehead tried to use your personal computer or mine, we
could have quite legally stopped him, or never allowed him to start in the
first place.

Don't confuse the owner of the computer which Mr. Verity supervises with the
owner of the computer in your home or mine; or the computer at AT&T or
General Motors. They are privately owned. The PSU computer is owned by
the government, and routinely made available to qualified members of the
public. The government has to find some other legitimate reason to stop
the use of the machine. Speech alone won't cut it.

>Because the vast majority of people who own and pay for USENET machines don't
>want (a) odious postings of this magnitude (b) in newsgroups where they
>aren't welcome.

Are you now suggesting that Usenet is a democracy rather than an anarchy?
The majority vote decides things? The way to avoid an 'odious posting of
this magnitude' is to not make it available for readers on your machine.
Your readers will never know about it; they will live in blissful ignorance
of the dispute, and those sites that do want to display the message can
do so. 

>> Speech is never illegal in this country, according to the ACLU.
  
>Wrong.  It is clear that you specifically intend never to understand
>the Constitution, or possibly anything at all.

You might be surprised. In the original message, correspondent said 'there
are times the ACLU considers speech illegal' (approximate quote). I then
replied as above, that the *ACLU* -- repeat, *ACLU* has claimed on various
occassions that speech; standing alone on its own merits -- is NEVER
illegal. 

And you come back, not with examples of where the ACLU did in fact agree
that speech under some circumstances is illegal, but instead, talking about
my understanding of the constitution! As a matter of fact, I can think of
a few examples of 'illegal speech'; speech which receives no constitutional
protection -- but I am sure the ACLU would disagree with me on that point.

>> Whitehead did not generate all the messages which went back to his site.
>> Those were generated by the users who wrote him or his sysadmin -- not
>> the other way around. Whitehead wrote one message, posted a dozen places.

>Posted twice, note, when the first posting generated very little flamage.

>> How many of you wrote back, cross posting everywhere in the process?
>> So who was the biggest waster of bandwidth?
>> 
>"It wasn't my fault!  I was just pointing my Uzi in the mall at random!
>All those people who deliberately got in the way of the bullets are at fault!"

I have not yet been able to detirmine if you *actually believe* an analogy
like this is correct, or if you just posted it in the hopes of causing still
more hate and discontent. It seems really strange to have to explain all this,
but firing a gun at a crowd of people randomly is an act of violence. A
speech is not an act of violence. And in any event, people who dodge bullets
coming at them are not doing the same thing as people who fire bullets back
at the first person. I will overlook your false analogy this time, but please
try use a more appropriate one the next time we correspond.

>> I just thought
  
>I doubt that.

You doubt what? That I think; or that I have the capacity to think; or that
I think politically correct thoughts about homosexuals? Which?

>Since you have made so abundantly clear that you think freedom of speech
>means the right to say anything, anywhere, anytime, I will let your local
>Klan know that you've invited them to have their next meeting in your
>living room.  And don't you DARE try to suppress their freedom to spout
>evil _in your living room_, because it's their RIGHT, right?  Enjoy!

Where the GOVERNMENT; i.e. in the issue at hand, Pennsylvania State
University and its employee Verity are concerned, freedom of speech does 
mean the right to say anything, anywhere, and anytime, when using government
facilities which have historically been defined as a forum.

Neither my living room, nor yours is a forum. Neither my living room, nor
yours is a government owned place. Neither you or I, or any private 
individual reading this message is obliged to assist someone else make a 
'free speech'. The government is not obliged to help with it either, but
when by wilfull action or default a forum exists under the auspices of the
government, then the government cannot stop the forum merely because of
the speech. 

Neither the Klan nor the Nazis are welcome in my living room; and I am sure the
government at its facility in State College, PA does not welcome them either;
but if they legitimatly enroll there, and take courses which entitle them
to otherwise use the computer and participate in Usenet, then the government
will have to put up with their speeches also.

I do not hold that 'free speech' is legal in all cases; nor that private
parties must ever accomodate it. And if there is some contention that 
Whitehead's speech was illegal on its face, then that should be decided by
a judge or jury; neither of which are job descriptions which apply to Mr.
Verity. 

-- 
Patrick Townson 
  patrick@chinet.chi.il.us / ptownson@bu-cs.bu.edu / US Mail: 60690-1570 
  FIDO: 115/743 / AT&T Mail: 529-6378 (!ptownson) /  MCI Mail: 222-4956