I am constantly shocked at the vast movement against free speech on many different subjects, in many different professions, and in many areas within America. Being born in a country whose first declaration toward freedom was a declaration of free speech, you would think that we would be the tolerant and reasonable ones in this area, but in many respects we are falling behind in this regard. There are many individuals who, themselves, don’t want to listen to the opposing opinion and close their worlds off to the suggestion on change. These people have the right, as individuals to hold these views for themselves, that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is when big movements use power and influence and the government to squash free speech or ridicule the opposing view. Words that come out of the government like, “The debate is over” and “We are doing it to better the collective and the uneducated” these are keywords that show me that the debate is not over, and the only reason to silence an opposing view is so that the people don’t know they have a choice. You think, “I have never heard someone from the US government try to restrict speech,” well you haven’t been listening close enough.

I know, this is America and we live in a world of instant access to information from the almost hundreds of news programs on cable and satellite TV, radio and satellite radio, news papers, magazines, and the vast informative internet. How could anyone, even the government suppress an idea or opinion? Well your Congress is working hard, in closed rooms for now, on a bill that they intend to bring up soon called the Fairness Doctrine. Sound Fair? Well here is some history. It was originally enacted in 1949, it stated that all news programming had to be “fair and balanced” and regulated by the FCC. Sound fair? What it really did was suppress speech, mainly political speech that’s why it was abolished in 1987 as unconstitutional. Well they are planning to bring it back, to re-suppress free speech in radio and even the internet. Still sound fair?

“The debate is over!” since Al Gore made that statement we have seen the debate rage on, in the global warming fight. First it was speculation that the globe was in a warming trend, and then it became man made and the governments of the world found a cause that they could get behind and would give those in control lots of power. Now we know that the globe is not warming, and man has minimal impact on the climate, and we see the effects on our economy from governments trying to step in and legislate off bad science. So why is the debate over? This was a massive attempt, which is still widely believed, to silence the opposing view of global warming, which is growing, so that the government could seize on the opportunity to gain more power.

The debate of Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design is one getting more and more heated with Ben Stein’s movie Expelled. More of the same is going on I’m afraid, you have the entrenched Darwinist that can’t possibly bring any other idea into a theory with massive holes. The intelligent design crowd is offering scientific research with new answers and new questions for Darwin’s theories. But in the academic circles and political circles that’s not a good thing, so they are suppressed along with anyone else who poses an opposing view. Darwinism is closely tied to politics these days and in America it drives the debate of taking any type of religion out of government.

There are many other ways that the government or large groups are trying to suppress ideas and the beliefs of others, that’s why I think is so important to get back to the fundamentals of our founding. A strong belief in freedom of speech, property, and of having individual freedoms is what will keep us strong and free. Federalism and Constitutionalism is a great foundation for this. The more we move away from this and move toward a central, powerful, and large government that is for the masses and the collective and not for individual freedoms, the worse off we’ll be.