It was 1945 and I was 5 years old. I was standing in front of the kitchen sink and my mother, when for some reason I said “sonofabitch.” It was immediate and quick that my mother’s left hand had a hold of my head and her left hand inserted a small bar of soap into my mouth. I had been censored. My first amendment right to free speech had been curtailed. Free speech has been regulated in many ways by mothers teaching their kids about cussing and how to use proper language and has always been not available to use; yelling fire in a crowded room. There are laws and regulations that govern speech such as slander against another person or lying in a court of law. Both can cause fines or imprisonment or both. Lying to a federal agent is a felony as we have seen recently during the investigations into the Russian interference in our elections. Some have gone to jail because of it. Most of time we can say anything we wish to and even stretch the truth at times. We see this happening all the time in advertising and political promotion. Part of free speech can be only telling part of the story and leaving out other parts.
We have seen, lately, the censorship of speech by shutting down people trying to give testimony before school boards and city and town counsels. A man that tried to tell a school board about his daughter’s sexual assault in her school bathroom by a transsexual was arrested and removed from the room. Another school employee was fired because he complained about his daughter being molested in her school bathroom. Saying a prayer after or before an athletic game is prohibited and the use of certain words have been banned in certain areas. Stanford recently banned the word America and many other colleges and universities have banned the use of sexual pronouns. Most of this is for supposed diversity which means for the LGBTQ and black community. The diversity does not include equality for the homeless and less fortunate among us but just a small contingent that wishes to shut up any speech that they disagree with.
As I was growing up a lot of names for ethnic peoples were used to describe them such as Wop for Italian and the N-word for negro. Martin Luther King’s work up to the new legislation against discrimination stopped the use of the n-word and following that the other ethnic names seem to go away. This was a good modification to our language and forced us to learn new words and phrases to describe people in a more considerate way. We now see language being censored by the social media giants as just revealed by Elon Musk in Twitter. The democratic party and government used social media outlets to further their elections odds by requesting and getting more conservative speech shut down on these platforms. One can only imagine what kind of censorship occurred on the other social media outlets such as Facebook, etc. I read an article on Facebook about the Cessna Cardinal airplane. I responded that I had taken my private pilot’s flight test in a Cessna Cardinal and had later flown a newer model with controllable propellor and larger engine. I was immediately told by Facebook that my language was inappropriate and there could be no further response to my post. I had been censored. Maybe they thought the Cessna airplane was republican.
We are being censored in our political speech if it goes against those in power and many words have been banned to designate the human sex of man and women. Our newest Supreme Court Judge could not define the word, woman, during her hearings. It is imperative that those of us that know the real power of free speech fight all attempts to restrict it. The only way for socialism to exist is to restrict speech, books and religion and those freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution must be protected and continued.
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