Congress Wants to Tape Your Mouth Shut, Steal Your Wallet

i wish it were so...but it's not. go back and blame the liberal new deal courts for that one.

 

ok...so if we could change it such that mar1juana were NOT a schedule 1 substance...would any of you have problems with this bill at all?

 

I would.

It's restricting lobbying to change a law.

 

no...it's not a direct restriction...it's indirect at best, and is still ultimately the decision of the mass transit authority.

 

of course...why a publicly owned mass transit authority has the authority to make that decision at all is something i'm still grappling with!

 

Wow, that sounds like a *real* lunatic fringe. Any references, Max? I work with several psychology profs here at the university and have buddies who practice in town, and they all believe it's Destructive, capital D. Maybe your reference came from Lucretius or some other Roman psychologist.

Sorry, I know this is off the main rails now.

 

no...it was mainstream...this was published in a major journal..and it received a tremendous backlash.

 

again...this bill does not say, "you can't advertise (insert cause here) on public transportation"

it says...if municipal transit authorities choose to accept those ads, then they won't get some money from a pool of federal money.

it's not an outright ban...

again...i'm wrestling with why a public transit authority would even get a choice. my thought is all political speech on those things should be banned.

if you can't put a ten commandments monument in a court because it's an endorsement of a religion...then you can't put signs propounding a certain political position on a publicly operated vehicle, because it too is an endorsement. separate concerns under the bill of rights, i know...i'm working on it.

 

a direct restriction is one where the govt tells a private actor, "you can't say that." that's direct.

this is indirect...this is a public actor telling another public actor that if it wants funds from a certain pool, it has to do certain things. or not do certain things, in this instance.

 

Reading the WashPost article on the incident that prompted this kerfluffle makes me think the head of Metro used remarkably poor judgement. Not only did he accept an ad in questionable taste, under threat of a time and money consuming lawsuit from the ACLU (btw, i have no position on whether marajuana should be legal- just can't get that worked up about it since i smoked my last doobie maybe 20 years ago. but they'll have to pry my single-malt from my cold, dead hands... ), he gave the ad to them for free! seriously, these guys were asking for this.

how is this different from congress prohibiting who the NEA from granting money to excrement smeared images of Christ? As an artist, i think government should give more money to the arts, not less, but as a taxpayer i object to my tax money being used to fund projects (can't call it art) that are crude, boorish, and exist only to make a political point. similarly, why should public money be required to fund advertisements favoring an activity that is currently illegal? The bill doesn't seek to muzzle all speech that favors the legalization of MJ, merely to prohibit using public money to agitate against an activity the government prohibits, and regards as a public health issue. this seems so self-evident as to be unremarkable. Buy a billboard, ads in Vanity Fair, advertise on MTV. you can still get your message across. There is no violation of the right to free speech, since the 5th amendment doesn't require to government to fund all types of speech.

 

oh, and andy, congratulations on the imminent birth of your son! i've got one coming in 12 weeks!

 

Okay, I'll look it up myself.

It sounds like *one* article in *one* journal, which is something entirely different than an entire society of psychologists! Do you see what I mean? Science (and social science in this case) always has some difference of opinion and theory. When you get over 95% of a discipline saying the same thing, then that's more or less "what the field as a whole believes." You said an entire organization made this claim about molestation.

So, back to my original point: most psychologists believe that child abuse is greatly harmful. T_J was intentionally chumming the water with red herrings as per usual, which I don't mind because it is so entertaining.

Okay, back to regularly scheduled programming.

PS -- congrats to the soon-to-be dads in the forum. May they sing well and/or smoke legalized m******a as adults if they so choose.

 

The fact that its an indirect ban, and not a direct ban, doesn't necessarily trump anything. THough it's murky, there's several cases that say that witholding money on viewpoint based reasons for federally funded programs amounts to a first amendment violation,. There are also some that don't, such as the library internet filter case

However, this isn't like your normal ban/witholding of funding on drug propaganda or library internet p*rn. The speech is an argument for legislative action. That goes to the very heart of the first amendment. This kind of speech gets uber protection.

The reasoning of the library case, from what I recall, was based around the traditional interest that the library had for keeping p*rn out,and congress' law paralleled that, among other things, and the argument of the petitioners was not that p*rn should be kept in, but that the filtering software was inaccurate and might block non-p*rn, . But this doesn't do any such thing. THis is specifically designed to thwart a political view.

However, that isn't even an issue here. It's not about an attempt to block unprotected speech, it's a straight up attempt to block protected political speech to specifically discourage that viewpoint. This is about as bad as it gets, from a constitutional standpoint, and I find it hard to believe that even this Supreme Court would let this kind of thing fly.

Now, the goal of the subway isn't to elect candidates or sell breath mints or whatever, it's to move people. Same thing with public transit funds. But as long as you're going to do it, and make it a de facto public forum, you just can't do a direct or indirect viewpoint based restriction, especially one that has nothing at all to do with public transit.

Banning all political speech or ads on a subway or bus or whatever is certainly permissible. However, are political ads on the DC subway that much of a problem? It is patently absurd that an ad for hemorrhoid cream, commerical speech, gets more protection in a public forum than pure political speech, no matter what the message.

 

agreed...it was just like the lead article in a very prominent journal one month.