The Freedom of Speech Witch Hunt
Is it just me, or has anyone else notice that our First Amendment right of free speech is becoming subjective? CNN.com has published an article on Facebook being urged to remove Holocaust deniers from its social network website. Over the past few weeks, we have been inundated with news about Carrie Prejean and her controversial answer to a question about gay marriage. Regardless of what you or I believe, we have the responsibility to respect that not everyone will agree with us. The idea that we are hunting people down and digging up dirt on individuals that we disagree with is only going to end up hurting everyone in the end. This trend, to me, seems more like 'new age' discrimination. Instead of discriminating against people because of their skin color, nationality, accent etc, we have moved to discriminating based on values, morals and beliefs. Carrie Prejean is entitled to have her own beliefs and convictions and should not be 'crucified' for voicing her beliefs when asked a question. The same goes for the Facebook issue. What happens if Facebook starts removing individuals because of their beliefs and/or morals? Where will it stop? Next it will be anti-abortion supporters or some other 'group' that may be 'offensive' to someone. Now to be clear, sometimes discrimination is needed with applications like Facebook or Myspace or any type of social network. We need to try to ensure the safety of everyone. In order to do that, some people, such as sex predators and child predators need to be banned. But banning individuals like this and banning an individual or group because of their beliefs are two completely different things. We as a nation, need to grow some thicker skin and stop getting offended when someone does not agree with us.
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