I’m down with Steyn on his condemnation of the would-be speech police:
When I wrote over the weekend about the trial of Australia’s most prominent columnist for expressing his opinions, I did not expect it to be quite so immediately relevant to the United States. But perhaps what’s most disturbing about Lindsey Graham’s dismal defense of his inclinations to censorship is the lack of even the slightest attempt to underpin his position with any kind of principle. He all but literally wraps himself in the flag, and, once you pry him out of the folds of Old Glory, what you’re left with is a member of the governing class far too comfortable with the idea that he and his colleagues should determine the bounds of public discourse.
I’m sick of that. I’m sick of it in Canada, sick of it in Britain, in Australia, in Europe, and I’m now sick of it in America – in part because, as Senator Graham has demonstrated in his fatuous defense, guys like him aren’t smart enough to set the rules for what the rest of us are allowed to think.
The irony, of course, is that Sen. Graham (R-SC), is talking about throwing out the First Amendment in order to defend non-Americans who wish to establish Sharia in the United States from criticism by Americans. That should be more than enough to deny him the Republican nomination in his next electoral campaign. It is time to restore the Constitutional rights of free speech and free association to Americans. I propose establishing the following principles:
a) Any private employer can hire or fire any employee for any reason.
b) No public employer may deny employment or fire any employee for any expressed opinion about anything.
If you are a private employer, then it is your business and only your business if you want to employ nothing but black lesbian Marxists or Holocaust-denying Scottish neo-Nazis. But if you are a public employer, then you have absolutely no right to favor one socio-political perspective over another. Free association and free speech. It doesn’t get anymore fundamentally American than that.