The Bill of Rights protects everyone, no matter your race or your ideology
In America, we need to stand up for every minority. Yes, that means racial minorities but it is so much more than that. The Bill of Rights is also for those who might be unorthodox, who might have an unusual idea; who might not look or act like everybody else. The Bill of Rights recognizes the value of each individual within a country of 350 million.
What the left fails to understand is that protecting minorities is about protecting all minorities, whether it’s the color of your skin or the shade of your ideology, whether you homeschool your kids, support the Second Amendment, or are a poor kid from the inner city. Even people or books with ideas that some feel might damage our country, like socialism or communism, are and should be protected by the First Amendment.
We have entered into a most dangerous time when certain favored groups get special protection while others are condemned and canceled. The First Amendment is precisely about protecting unpopular or problematic speech.
Yet today the ‘woke’ clamor to cancel people and ideas, to ban books. The problem is, who among us is worthy of deciding what is so “dangerous” or “wrong” that it must be silenced? Who should have the power to determine what their fellow adult citizen can or cannot read or watch? Some bureaucrat sitting in government agency? Some billionaire tech company head?
Amazon recently banned a book that is a first-hand account of people unhappy about their decision to surgically and/or medically change their secondary sexual characteristics. Their lived experiences must be silenced, according to Amazon.
Similarly, Amazon’s streaming service recently dropped a documentary about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, refusing to explain why the film has been erased. The documentary tells the inspiring story of Thomas’s life, in his own words, from a childhood of extreme poverty and racism in Georgia all the way to Yale Law School and a seat on the US Supreme Court. It certainly wasn’t lack of popularity with viewers, as the film had performed better than documentaries on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Anita Hill, which remain available.
Considering the fact that Amazon was a key player in de-platforming Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, one can only assume it is part of its ongoing effort to actively silence anyone who questions the prevailing dogma coming from the government, media, and big tech.
Today, to be counter-culture is to believe in the very foundational elements of American exceptionalism: Free enterprise, free speech, and the right to assembly and privacy.
Two ‘woke’ congressmen have even called for cable giants to ban conservative news programs. Whatever happened to the ‘classical’ liberals who believed strongly in the first amendment?
Think of the left’s proposed abandonment of the Bill of Rights in the context of a debate I once had with John McCain. He was arguing for indefinite detention of ‘enemy combatants’ in Guantanomo Bay.
I asked him incredulously, “You could take an American citizen and send them to Guantanamo Bay without a trial?” and he said, “Yeah, if they’re dangerous. “
So I responded, “It begs the question, doesn’t it, who gets to decide who’s dangerous and who’s not?”
Remember Richard Jewell, the so-called “Olympic bomber?” Everybody thought he was guilty; he was ‘convicted’ on television within hours—but it turned out he wasn’t—it wasn’t him, he wasn’t guilty.
No one physically harmed Richard Jewell. But could you imagine if he had been a black man in the South in 1905, what would have happened to him? The Bill of Rights is precisely for the disfavored, the unpopular, but we must remember that one can be a minority not only of race but also because of creed or ideology. Today’s ‘woke’ folks on the left need to realize they do great damage to all minority rights when they seek to ban the expression of ideas they find disagreeable.
Rand Paul is a U.S. Senator for Kentucky.