(Host)
Commentator Bill Schubart writes about living in Vermont from his home
in Hinesburg. Lately he’s been thinking about the Supreme Court’s
"Citizens United" decision, the principle of free speech, and the law of
unintended consequences.
(Schubart) Social conservatives like
to use the phrase "moral relativism" to describe their liberal
counterparts, perhaps because absolutes are simple and easy to remember,
if not to live by. Our judicial system was designed for the reality of
moral relativism. Whenever we try to impose moral absolutes they fail.
A
judge must understand and act on the relative merits of each case.
Remember the Rockefeller drug laws and their mandated sentencing? In the
ensuing decades judges had little choice but to lock up more young
adults than ever before in our history and drug crimes went from street
to pharmacy.
A judge must have the same leeway to punish the
"feel good" doctor, liberally dispensing opiates to patients , as he or
she has to punish the street drug dealer – the same leeway to sentence
the well-heeled financial criminal as he or she has to sentence the
street criminal who’s robbed a convenience store.
Life doesn’t
respond well to absolutes. One might well argue that the sixth
commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," is interpreted more liberally in red
states, by means of the death penalty and concealed-carry gun laws.
We like to make things simple, but then again, sometimes we don’t when we ourselves feel the pain.
I
attended a community meeting recently in which Vermonters discussed
practical and impractical ways to express their anger against the
Citizens United decision.
The principle behind Citizens United
is free speech, the first amendment to our constitution and a founding
principle of our democracy. Free speech, however, has always been
subject legally to relative rather than absolute interpretation. The
free speech that protects pornography does not extend to children. The
freedom of expression that protects public proclamations does not
include yelling "fire" in a crowded move theater.
Currently,
however, it does protect the cannonade of political rhetoric so riddled
with made-up facts that fact-checking has become a growth industry.
The group discussed the legal evolution of how "free speech" came to include money and how corporations became "people".
There
was also concern expressed that Citizens United trumps the
long-standing commercial speech doctrine that governs truth in
advertising. If corporations are indeed people and their speech has the
same protections, truth-in-advertising falls victim to corporate
personhood as well. The sky’s the limit.
The judicial activism
that conservatives love to condemn, in fact, underlies the evolution of
Citizens United and it will take a groundswell of citizen outcry to
again differentiate corporations from human beings. Life would be much
simpler if we could live by absolutes, but the great challenge and
beauty of life lies in its complexity. It places on us the
responsibility to think and learn and listen before we act – because the
right answers are hardly ever simple.