By constantly bashing the mainstream media, are we at TPOL attacking free speech? After all, don’t the publishers, editors, and writers of NBC, CNN, The WaPo, NYT, USA Today, The Blaze, WND, and all the rest have the right to speak openly and freely. Whether they are wrong or not?

We defend anyone’s right to speak (write, publish, record, etc.) freely on any subject. Whether right or wrong. But we defend our own God-given right to challenge, contest, disagree, and point out when what they say is wrong. Either when someone fails to tell the truth, or when they twist things around. Not just draw the wrong conclusions but claim that only they know the truth and can explain it properly.

Free speech is not just a fundamental requirement for a republic, or even a “democracy” but for society. As is the right to challenge when someone abuses that right. But the challenge must be appropriate to the offense.

For example, teachers do not chop off a student’s hand (or even a finger!) for misspelling a word. Or writing down something that is obviously untrue.

When we read of someone taking action to defend a person’s right to speak freely, it is usually something to do with courts, or perhaps local government agencies (especially public schools (GRTF-institutions)). We might hear about someone vandalizing a sign or marker. Or a college trying to implement “free speech zones” to restrict people’s right to speak up. Or trying to out-shout someone that they don’t want to be heard.

But sometimes, it is much different.

An example of that took place in Austin, Texas, a few weeks back. As reported on CBSAustin, two people were having a discussion about the Bible on a public transit bus when a man complained “I’m tired of hearing your voice,” and attacked one of them with a kitchen knife. Another man responded to defend the victim, who was seriously injured, and was himself stabbed or cut by the perp.

What motivates this action? Is it madness? We wonder, how many people do we know who carry a kitchen knife on them on a bus? Was the man “offended” because he was forced to hear two people talk about religion? Not to him, but to each other?

In places like Britain (the UK) and modern Canada, such a discussion might even be prosecuted as a crime. Because it offended someone overhearing the conversation. Because it is now a forbidden topic of discussion, public or private. (As it was in many Communist countries, once upon a time. And still may be in some.) But even London and Ottawa have not yet resorted to summary courts martial and immediate execution for such a “crime.”

But they could? And indeed, they have in the past. The British royal government, first under the suzerainty of the Roman Catholic Church (that is, the Pope) and then in the guise of the Church of England, banned, persecuted, and prosecuted “non-conformers” to the point of drawing and quartering them and burning them at the stake. (Don’t believe it was just Catholics who did that: so did Anglicans and Lutherans and others!)

You are NOT defending free speech if you either support people’s right only to speak what you want to hear, or if you uncritically accept anything you are told.

But protecting someone’s right to speak, write, paint, carve, perform, etc. requires a lot more than just speaking up for those who do so, or protesting in support of them. Or even lobbying for them. It sometimes requires physical violence to keep someone from having their ability to express themselves taken away. Either temporarily or permanently on this earth!

Sometimes that violent defense is against a crazy madman as may have been the case in Austin. But we also must remember that it is government goons that often work the most to deny this freedom, and do so in a manner that requires that violent defense! Not just against the bureaucrats and jack-booted thugs, but against the majority or plurality of voters that tolerate and promote and support the thugs and bureaucrats. Often the “democratic” (generic, not party!) majority are the greatest enemies of free speech.

Are you prepared? Are we? Think on these things!