How Your Freedoms are being Destroyed by your Governments

The reason why so many Web pages on the Internet were made black (most of which have now been at least temporarily returned to normal) was in mourning over the incredibly bad Telecommunications Reform Act, signed by the President on February 8th, 1996. This bill tramples roughshod over first-amendment freedoms which generations of our forefathers fought and died to get and keep, and which our elected officials in Washington are all UNDER SWORN OATH to protect and defend. It is outrageous that the news media in this country have STILL not made people in this country aware of just how awful this legislation being enacted is.

Most people are not aware that this legislation (while allowing cable TV companies owned by huge international media conglomerates to send violent and pornographic movies into the home) makes it illegal for American citizens to even DISCUSS the subject of abortion on the Internet.

Most people are not aware that this legislation makes it illegal to post Catcher in the Rye, or Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, to the Internet. Even The Holy Bible (!) cannot be legally posted, because some passages in it are "indecent".

The CRUCIAL, BASIC right in a free society is the right to freedom of speech. And indeed, the very first right guaranteed in our Bill of Rights is precisely that: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Association, Freedom of Peaceable Assembly.

Freedom of Speech, of course, means NOTHING if it does not include the right to say things that might make someone, somewhere, uncomfortable.

What's even worse is that, where the United States OUGHT to come out strongly on the world stage in favor of freedom of speech and the democracy that is so dependent upon it, instead Congress has come out for censorship and restriction of "allowable topics". Like Germany which recently caused Compuserve to close down 200 newsgroups (including one which carried nothing racier than wire service stories from Reuters and the Associated Press regarding homosexuality); like AOL which recently censored the word "breast" and thereby causing great anguish within their service's discussion group for survivors of breast cancer; like China which is even now preventing their citizens from accessing anything more than an "officially approved" and sanitized/censored version of the Internet, or like France which in May 1996 seized hard drives containing Usenet newsgroups and put directors of at least two Internet Service Providers under interrogation (typically prior to filing criminal charges) due to the availability of pedophile and other illegal-within-France material within the Usenet newsgroups which those ISPs made available. Our government is sending the message to other governments in third-world dictatorships that "it's okay to criminalize people saying things on the Internet that you don't want them to say, and talking about things you don't want them to discuss." It's a VERY SAD DAY for democracy!!!

And now, in January 2001, following our coup d'etat which saw the loser of a Presidential election installed in the White House as a result of a shameful breach of judicial ethics by our Supreme Court (which apparently none dare call treason), the Right Wing is preparing to enforce their own style of "morality", starting with the Internet.

OF COURSE there is material on the Internet that is not suitable for children. There is material IN LIFE which is not suitable for children. Where are these kids' parents? Are we next going to have the government, or Christian Coalition, or someone else (who?), go into the libraries and start burning all the books and other publications that are not suitable for children? Because once we start down the slippery slope, once the sacred principle of Freedom of Speech is abridged, there's no telling where it will end.

Another stupid thing about this whole issue is that Congress, which is supposedly so damned concerned about balancing the budget and reducing government waste, is instead passing laws which are CLEARLY unconstitutional and which are going to keep hundreds or thousands of lawyers (many of whom are paid with OUR TAX MONEY), not to mention all their numerous support staff members, busy for years in the resulting absurd litigation.

The first lawsuit has already been posted... the first suit by a nonprofit, volunteer organization whose worthwhile goal is to stop the brutal sexual rape of prisoners in our "correctional institutions", and whose ability to do that will be crippled by their inability to describe on their award-winning Web page the outrageous conditions that many prisoners find themselves in.

The best defense against tyranny is an informed population (another reason why governments are afraid of the Internet). I urge you to check out some of the following links:

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The broadcast news media is talking about the Telecommunications Reform Bill and the Internet protest as if it's ONLY about "putting pornography and/or obscenity on the Internet", and that is only a VERY SMALL part of what this issue is all about.

This page and all linked contents originating with me are Copyright (C) 1996 by Gordon E. Peterson II, all rights reserved worldwide. This page itself was last revised January 29, 2001 (but note that individual pages linked below this one probably have been revised more recently!).