Category Archives: Free Speech

The Coalition says it would repeal laws used to prosecute Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. Picture: Trevor Pinder Source: Herald Sun

THE Greens have hit out at the Coalition's plan to change free speech restrictions in racial discrimination law.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has revealed the plan to change the laws if he was made prime minister.

The plan would see sections of the Racial Discrimination Act that were used to prosecute Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt last year, after he wrote about light-skinned Aborigines, repealed by the Coalition.

Greens legal affairs spokeswoman Penny Wright said the Oppositions proposal to allow people to express views that could be offensive would lead to ''distortions of the truth''.

''If the Coalition have their way we will see a situation where an influential commentator may use errors of fact, distortions of the truth and inflammatory and provocative language to offend or insult people of a certain race, colour or ethnic origin, with impunity,'' Senator Wright said.

''Yes, there is an important balance to be struck between the right to freedom of expression and the right to be protected against discrimination. But we think that the Act in its current form gets that balance right.''

The Australian newspaper reports shadow Attorney-General George Brandis saying that the changes would mean the removal of provisions that prevent the use of words that could offend or insult.

"We consider that to be an inappropriate limitation on freedom of speech and freedom of public discussion as was evident in the Andrew Bolt case," he said.

"Offensive and insulting words are part of the robust democratic process, which is essential to a free country."

Continued here:
Coalition free speech plans attacked

27-02-2012 19:37 Glenn discusses the Jeremy Lin controversy and the state of freedom of speech and capitalism in America web.gbtv.com

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GBTV: "Jellyfish Capitalism" and Free Speech PART 2 - Video

27-02-2012 21:38 atlah.org Recorded on 23 February 2012. Free speech in America is being taken away.

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Give Me Free Speech - Video

Summary: WKU has been accused of censorship and limiting free speech after fighting satirical and negative comments about the university on Twitter.

Western Kentucky University has beencriticized for censoring behaviour after fighting fiercely against negative comments and parodies of the institution on social networking sites, including Facebook and Twitter.

In recent months, the academic institution has begun monitoring and fighting against satirical commentary and student criticism of the universitys officials and WKU itself which appears online.

Fighting the social media activity, Western Kentucky University has taken steps that have raised outcry by students and advocates, who claim it is a violation of free speech rights and that the moves were made in order to censor students.

Gary Ransdell, the WKU president wrote this message on the universitys Facebook wall:

Normally I post Facebook updates when interesting and cool things are happening with me or with WKU. This message, however, is aimed at everyone who uses Facebook or other social media, especially students and others who are building resumes. We, at WKU, have become particularly conscious lately of some who are misusing social media and using some poor judgment. So my message here is Be smart.

Use social media thoughtfully; always remember what you send is permanent and can be viewed years from now. Employers do their homework. They can and will track ways in which prospective employees have used social media. We, at WKU, track such things as well. Be smart and remember the Golden Rule. It applies as much to the use of social media as it does to how we conduct our daily lives. Think twice before you hit the post button or send key. Be smart, Hilltoppers!

It is reported that this may have been in response to a fake Gary Ransdell Twitter account (@PimpRansdell) that at the universitys insistence was closed down briefly by Twitter for several weeks this year before becoming reinstated.

Is this friendly, sensible advice, or a veiled warning against students thinking of satirizing him or the institution he represents?

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University battles Twitter parodies, strangles free speech?

According to free speech experts, censorship has spread in schools and colleges throughout the United States in recent years.

In 2011, the Minnesota State Supreme Court ruled in favor of the University of Minnesota to reprimand the off-campus speech of student Amanda Tatro for comments made on Facebook.

The court indicated this ruling was not due to the nature of the comments but their effect on the university's curriculum. Therefore, it became possible for the university to control a student's off-campus speech when it affected the reputation of the school.

"To the extent a decision is made regarding curriculum, the school should be able to make it," Missouri Press Association consultant Jean Maneke said. "To the extent a publication exists as public forum, there needs to be tolerance for free speech."

Tatro's Facebook comments focused on taking out her aggression in a science-mortuary class on a cadaver she named Bernie. Another student found the posts offensive and turned them over to the university. Families that donated cadavers called in concerns to the university, and Tatro was briefly expelled from class while police investigated her Facebook threats to stab an ex-boyfriend with medical equipment.

Tatro was venting in an off-campus forum thought to be outside the university's reach. Due to a lack of precedent for this case, the courts looked to the 1988 Missouri case Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier involving high school students.

Before Hazelwood, the Supreme Court gave primary education students the benefit of free speech as long as it was not disruptive to the school environment. Hazelwood increased the level of censorship to control any action that caused "legitimate concern related to individual rights, safety or distractions to the school environment."

The Hazelwood decision allowed school officials to censor clothing, speech and even hair color. The 6th Circuit Court also recently applied the Hazelwood decision to permit a university to discipline off-campus speech it said affected school relations in the 2011 Minnesota v. Tatro case.

"The First Amendment document called this the chilling effect," said Charles Davis, University of Missouri's facilitator of the Media of the Future Initiative for Mizzou Advantage. "It makes people think twice about what they are saying."

A representative of the Student Press Law Center agreed that university students should not be judged on the same standard as high school students.

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censorship laws become an important issue in schools and universities

26-02-2012 23:16 staff.tumblr.com Voice your opinions: policy@tumblr.com

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What's Happening to Free Speech? - Video

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass.—A Massachusetts man has settled a federal lawsuit that claimed his free speech rights were violated when he was removed from a public meeting where he criticized school officials' handling of the case of a 15-year-old girl who committed suicide after allegedly being bullied by other high school students.

An attorney for Luke Gelinas (guh-LEE'-nuss) of South Hadley announced the $75,000 settlement Monday. Gelinas sued in 2010, saying he was improperly ejected from a South Hadley school committee meeting when he criticized officials for the death of Irish immigrant Phoebe Prince, which gained international attention.

The lawsuit named Edward Boisselle, then school committee chairman, and two police officers.

Gelinas said in a statement Monday his lawsuit was about "social justice, which has been served."

Messages were left Monday for Boisselle and the town's attorney.

© Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Excerpt from:
Free speech suit settled in school bullying case

Government employees who get into trouble for disobeying a superior’s plea to file a report that the employee thinks is false and believes will contribute to covering up misconduct will get no legal guidance on their plight from the Supreme Court, even though lower courts are in dispute over how to decide that issue.  Without comment, the Court on Monday denied review in two new cases, raising that First Amendment free-speech question from opposite sides.

The Court had been asked, in separate cases from New York and Washington, D.C.,  to further clarify its decision five years ago in Garcetti v. Ceballos, denying First Amendment protection to public employees for remarks they made in the course of their official duties.   Federal appeals courts have since split on whether that denial of protection extends even to a situation where a worker has been fired or otherwise disciplined for refusing to file an official report about their work, when superiors had demanded that the report be submitted in a form that would be false and could conceal wrongdoing within the agency.   The Justices’ refusal to step into that controversy leaves it to be worked out further among the lower courts, meaning that public employees will have different legal rights depending upon where they live and work.

The denial of review of that issue came amid a series of new orders, with the Court granting no new cases for decision.   In  one of the other orders, the Court refused — for the second time — to allow a conservative advocacy organization named Freedom Watch to join in the oral arguments on the new health care law.   Freedom Watch is not directly involved in the case, but it regards the new law as a forbidden intrusion into the private lives of Americans.  It has filed a friend-of-Court brief in the case seeking to compel Justice Elena Kagan’s disqualification from taking part in the coming decision, on the argument that she was involved previously as a government lawyer in the Obama Administration’s pursuit of the new law in Congress.   The Court refused on January 23 to grant Freedom Watch time in the oral argument, and, in the new order, it simply refused to reconsider.  Justice Kagan took herself out of the Court’s action on both occasions without saying why, but apparently because Freedom Watch’s challenge was a claim against her but was not one involving a formal motion for her to recuse.  If there were a formal recusal motion, she would act on it directly.  The Court’s orders on the argument issue contained no explanation.   There is no indication that Kagan will take herself out of participation in the health care argument or ruling.

In one of the public employee free-speech cases, Byrne, et al., v. Jackler (docket 11-517), the police chief and two other officers in Middletown, N.Y., sought to challenge a Second Circuit Court decision that they had acted illegally for their roles in the firing of a probationary officer after he had refused an order to file a report about another officer’s striking of a suspect during an arrest.  The fired officer, Jason M. Jackler, disobeyed because he knew the facts were different from those he was told to put in the report.  The Second Circuit ruled that Jackler was not acting in the role of a police officer, but rather as a private citizen resisting an official coverup, at the time he disobeyed, so the Garcetti decision did not apply.

Exactly the opposite outcome had come in the other case, Bowie v. Maddox (11-670).  David M. Bowie, a former FBI agent who had gone to work in the local Washington, D.C., government’s inspector general’s office, investigating misconduct inside the D.C. government.  Bowie was fired after he had refused to submit an affidavit that would have sided with his superiors falsely in a civil rights case involving a black employee against the IG office.  Bowie believed that the employee had been fired on demand from the FBI, which was reportedly upset by an earlier lawsuit claiming race bias in the Bureau’s policy on promoting black agents.  Bowie’s superiors wanted him to tell their version in the affidavit.  The D.C. Circuit Court, relying upon the Supreme Court’s Garcetti decision, ruled against Bowie, concluding that he was fired for refusing to carry out an order in the line of duty and thus had no First Amendment protection for his refusal.

Besides turning down both of those petitions, the Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a constitutional challenge to a Maine law that requires those seeking to raise and spend money in state election campaigns to organize as a political action committee for that activity, and make significant disclosures about their financial operations.   That was challenged in a petition, National Organization for Marriage v. McKee (11-599), after the state law was upheld by the First Circuit Court.  The NOM is an organization set up to promote the traditional view of marriage as being reserved solely for opposite-sex couples.  It argued in challenging the PAC requirement that states do not have the constitutional authority to impose such obligations unless an organization has election campaign activity as its “major purpose.”

Posted in Cases in the Pipeline, Featured

Recommended Citation: Lyle Denniston, Free speech issue bypassed, SCOTUSblog (Feb. 27, 2012, 12:23 PM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2012/02/free-speech-issue-bypassed/

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Free speech issue bypassed

Occupy-New-Mexico-DarwishThe efforts of pro-Palestinian “Occupy” protesters to stifle the free speech of pro-Israel speakers nationwide continued at the University of New Mexico on Thursday night when a small group tried to shout down a speech by author Nonie Darwish. This time, their pre-planned disruption led to a physical altercation.

Darwish, founder of Arabs for Israel and director of Former Muslims United, was speaking at an event titled, “Why the Arab Spring is Failing” organized by the University of New Mexico Israel Alliance and the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Activists from “(un)Occupy Albuquerque” – a group allied with the Occupy Wall Street movement – started a “people’s mic” seen frequently during the Occupy Wall Street protests.

unm2

As seen on a video posted to YouTube (below), the pro-Palestinian activists yelled: “Mic check! Nonie Darwish speaks for Israeli apartheid! And genocide at the hands of the IDF!”

Shortly after the “mic check” begins, the audience is heard shouting at those disrupting the speech, and chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Then, a scuffle begins. Though the camera angle is tight – which complicates providing an objective description -- it appears an older audience member tried to grab the paper (presumably the script of anti-Israel slogans) out of one of the Occupy protester's hands, which lead to pushing and shoving.

This as other audience members further away shouted profanities, urging them to “Get out!”

It’s unclear from the tape if an older male audience member lunged at the protesters or tripped on a chair and fell forward on then. Watch the two videos here posted by the protesters:

The activists and their supporters claimed three of them were “were assaulted on UNM campus for simply trying to make their voices heard and it is a shock that a non-violent action was met with such aggression.”

If you were wondering what “(un)Occupy” is, it’s part of the “Occupy” movement, but protests the movement’s use of the word “occupy,” because, according to its website:

The word “occupy” in general is offensive to most Native Americans and indigenous people and people of color in general – again in general. Occupations have displaced us for generations by Europeans.

After the protesters left and she was able to resume her speech, Darwish told the audience, “They could have waited to prove me wrong but they can’t unfortunately and I feel sad for them because our children are being poisoned mentally.”

Watch a video from the audience perspective here:

In the description accompanying a YouTube video, one of those who came to hear Darwish speak wrote:

The Nonie Darwish talk had a big turnout and most of the attendees were glad they were there, in spite of SJP and the Occupy people getting together to disrupt the talk and prevent the speaker from speaking in the name of free speech and tolerance. Several people in the audience went to chase them out of the lecture hall, in defense of their own free speech rights. The protesters took choice videos, lied about many things and plastered it all around so it would become news. Strange that these protesters were willing to serve as an object lesson and proof of what Nonie Darwish was telling the audience: Criticism of Islam is not tolerated, and following Sharia, others have no rights or freedoms.

Local news seemed to focus on the arguments made by the Occupy activists:

The pro-Palestinian (un)Occupy activists claimed their free speech was defended under the law, but the courts have issued contrary opinions on this kind of speech hijacking.

A California court last year found 10 Muslim students guilty of disrupting Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at the University of California, Irvine and also convicted them for conspiring to disrupt the speech. During the February 2010 event, they stood up, one by one, and shouted prepared statements such as "propagating murder is not an expression of free speech." The AP reported then:

Prosecutor Dan Wagner told jurors the students acted as censors to block the free flow of ideas and infringed upon the rights of 700 people who had gone to the Irvine campus to hear Oren.

Wagner showed video footage of university officials pleading with students to behave, but they kept interrupting the lecture. Wagner also showed emails sent among members of UC Irvine's Muslim Student Union planning the disruption and calculating who was willing to get arrested.

Defense attorneys countered there were no hard rules for the speech, and the students might have been discourteous but didn't break the law.

While free speech is protected under the First Amendment, allowing others to exercise that speech unimpeded, without being shouted down, is perhaps no less important.

Also Read

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Occupy Activists‘ ’Mic Check’ Prompts Physical Altercation at Pro-Israel College Event

24-02-2012 17:55 The Academy has banned Sacha Baron Cohen from coming in character to this weekend?s Oscars ceremony, so what does he have to say to them? That they are the ones acting like an evil dictator! Cohen released a new hilarious video statement -- while in character as General Aladeen , of course... in which he says: "I am OUTRAGED at being banned from The Oscars by the Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts and Zionists." The power hungry Dictator says: "While I applaud the academy for taking away my right to free speech ... I warn you that if you do not lift your sanctions and give me my tickets back by 12 PM on Sunday, you will face unimaginable consequences!" The Dictator says the worst part about being banned? He already paid Hilary Swank $2 million-dollars to be his date. Obviously mocking the fact that she attended the birthday party for an alleged war criminal. The video is really funny, whether he's actually mad at the Academy or not. But he managed to still promote his movie during the Oscars frenzy, which is what the Academy was specifically trying to prevent in the first place!

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"The Dictator" Fires Back At The Academy! - Video