Title: Shall make no law - Civil Liberties - 8/15/99
URL: http://civilliberty.about.com/library/weekly/aa081599.htm
Description: Free speech gets whacked again as the Senate tries to muzzle
drug talk. - from your About.com...
Thu, Aug 19, 1999
J.D. Tuccille - your About.com Guide to: Civil Liberties
Shall make no law
Dateline: 8/15/99
What is it about the tag-team duo of Sens. Orrin Hatch and Dianne Feinstein that compels them to race around the American landscape brandishing blue pencils, censors' tape, and handcuffs? They seem to have fallen into some brown-shirt mutation of love in their mad dash to impose new and ever-more bizarre speech restrictions and jail violators thereof. Their latest collaboration in a series (not to be renewed, we hope) is on a bill that seeks to win the unwinnable War on (some) Drugs by smothering tlk about forbidden substances.
The curiously named " Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act of 1999," forbids advertising or even linking from your Web site to sites that advertise so-called "drug paraphernalia." That is, if I link from this article to a page in High Times or a Dutch magazine that offers bongs for sale, I'd be liable to hefty penalties under the law. The same bill makes it illegal "to teach or demonstrate the manufacture of a controlled substance." Forget about those head-shop books toutin the proper use of grow lights; their authors, including Mel Frank and Ed Rosenthal, who penned a little manual I have called Marijuana Grower's Guide, would be liable to up to ten years in prison.
This isn't Feinstein's and Hatch's rst st-in-st stroll down censorship lane. First, they successfully co-sponsored a bill banning the possession of simulated images of child pornography, even though no children are involved in their creation. That law put a fair number of modern cutting-edge cartoonists at risk for their risque portrayals of lightly clad folks of indeterminate age.
Then the censorious duo pushed through a bill that made it unlawful "to teach or demonstrate the making or use of an explosive, a destructive device, or a weapon of mass destruction," to anybody who "intends to use the teaching, demonstration, or information for, or in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime of violence." The bad-thoughts-about-bombs measure, oddly tacked on to a bill " for the relief of Global xploration and Development Corporation, Kerr-McGee Corporation, and Kerr-McGee Chemical, LLC," is now on the president's desk. Don't know anybody who plans to use your Web-posted bomb-making recipes to blow up a federal building? Good luck to you you'll get to prove your innocent intentions in court. Bring your checkbook.
Somehow, I doubt that the bomb recipe law will be enforced against the Department of Agriculture, which has been distributing bomb-making instructions for years to farmers who want to make tree stumps go bye-bye. Nor is the U.S. Army likely to get slapped though it taught Timothy McVeigh how to do what he did so well.
Forgive me my confusion, but in my copy of the Constitution, the First Amendment is rendered in the following words:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress o grievances.
I've looked and I've looked, but nowhere can I nd a variation of the First Amendment that includes the escape clause: "Unless it really rufþes Sen. Feinstein's helmet hair or cracks the starch on Sen. Hatch's collars." Nope. Every copy of the First Amendment that I can nd says "Congress shall make no law." That would seem to mean, no law banning erotic (well, grotesque) computer-generated images. It would also seem to indicate no law forbidding the posting of encyclopedia entries saying that the proper proportions by weight of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur in blackpowder are 75%, 15.62%, and 9.38%. And, I may be so bold as to suggest that it would seem to indicate no law forbidding me from telling you that marijuana should be planted in soil with a pH between 6.5 and 7.5.
Fortunately, the prospects for the Feinstein-Hatch collaborations would seem to be pleasantly gloomy. The courts have generally been rather good on the First Amendment in recent years. They've shot down campaign nance "reform" laws that would interfere with political speech, and shut down the Communications Decency Act, among other attempts to muzzle any sort of online speech that might include the word "tit" or even something naughtier. Free speech, as a rule, is the healthiest and best-protected of our remaining liberties in the land of the once-free. Of the three senatorial censorship collaborations, the bomb recipe bill and the drug-talk bill have yet to become law, let alone be tested in court; their life expectancies appear liited, at best.
So Feinstein's and Hatch's obsession with snufng out edgy speech of virtually any sort would seem curious and doomed. But as any bored fth-grader knows, if you throw enough of whatever is at hand against the wall, something is bound to stick. By proposing censorship law after censorship law, Feinstein and Hatch subtly alter the playing eld of American politics. Their bills don't just ban disfavored activities, they make it difcult and legally dangerous to challenge laws that ba disfavored activities. Can you imagine critiquing the foolishness of the Drug War without being able to discuss how simple it is for black-marketeers to manufacture illicit substances?
And the political environment is becoming increasingly friendly to such efforts. Against a backdrop of lawsuits against adventurous publishers like Paladin Press, lm directors such as Oliver Stone, and repeated efforts to rewrite the Communications Decency Act in constitutional form, the censorious senators may just make their bills sticks.
For now, there's still time to crank up the fax connection to your congressman to lobby against the drug-talk bill. But be prepared: These bills, or their successors, are likely to slip into law one by one like raindrops nding a crack in the ceiling.
When that happens, hope, for the rst time in your life, that you get called for jury duty and keep the words "not guilty" permanently etched in your mind.
So you think Im full of it, eh? Then go to the source:
First Amendment
Reefer Madness Hits Congress Wired
Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act of 1999
For the relief of Global Exploration and Development Corporation, Kerr-McGee Corporation, and Kerr-McGee Chemical, LLC (bomb recipe bill)
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