“Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.”
― Winston S. Churchill
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First there’s the case of the outrageous Oregon gag order against the Christian bakers who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. If a bankrupting $135K fine wasn’t enough outrage, Aaron and Melissa Klein, the bakers, are now prohibited from taking their case to the public. The Daily Signal has the story:
Oregon Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian finalized a preliminary ruling today ordering Aaron and Melissa Klein, the bakers who refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, to pay $135,000 in emotional damages to the couple they denied service. “This case is not about a wedding cake or a marriage,” Avakian wrote. “It is about a business’s refusal to serve someone because of their sexual orientation. Under Oregon law, that is illegal.”
He is referring to the Equality Act of 2007. As I have long said, anti-discrimination laws are a gross violation of the rights of property owners to select with whom they will associate.
In the ruling, Avakian placed an effective gag order on the Kleins, ordering them to “cease and desist” from speaking publicly about not wanting to bake cakes for same-sex weddings based on their Christian beliefs.
“This effectively strips us of all our First Amendment rights,” the Kleins, owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, which has since closed, wrote on their Facebook page. “According to the state of Oregon we neither have freedom of religion or freedom of speech.”
Lawyers for plaintiffs, Rachel and Laurel Bowman-Cryer, argued that in making this statement, the Kleins violated an Oregon law banning people from acting on behalf of a place of public accommodation (in this case, the place would be the Kleins’ former bakery) to communicate anything to the effect that the place of public accommodation would discriminate.
This idea that a private business becomes a “public accommodation” is based on a long-standing and bad civil rights case which determined that any business open to the general public is no longer private. The Kleins’ lawyer, Anna Harmon, was shocked by the gag order.
“Brad Avakian has been outspoken throughout this case about his intent to ‘rehabilitate’ those whose beliefs do not conform to the state’s ideas,” she told The Daily Signal. “Now he has ruled that the Kleins’ simple statement of personal resolve to be true to their faith is unlawful. This is a brazen attack on every American’s right to freely speak and imposes government orthodoxy on those who do not agree with government sanctioned ideas.”
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, called the order “outrageous” and said citizens of Oregon should be “ashamed.” “This order is an outrageous abuse of the rights of the Kleins to freely practice their religion under the First Amendment,” he said.
Avakian would have fit right in as a bureaucrat in the Soviet Union or Red China. Oregon should be ashamed that such an unprincipled, scurrilous individual is a government official in the state.
The case began in February 2013 when Rachel and Laurel Bowman-Cryer filed a complaint against the Kleins for refusing to bake them a wedding cake.
In order to reach the total amount, $135,000, Rachel and Laurel submitted a long list of alleged physical, emotional and mental damages they claim to have experienced as a result of the Kleins’ unlawful conduct.
Examples of symptoms included “acute loss of confidence,” “doubt,” “excessive sleep,” “felt mentally raped, dirty and shameful,” “high blood pressure,” “impaired digestion,” “loss of appetite,” “migraine headaches,” “pale and sick at home after work,” “resumption of smoking habit,” “shock,” “stunned,” “surprise,” “uncertainty,” “weight gain” and “worry.”
What a bunch of crock! If these are actionable causes for claims against another’s money, we’re all in trouble.
In their Facebook post, the Kleins signaled their intention to appeal Avakian’s ruling, writing, “We will not give up this fight and we will not be silenced,” already perhaps putting themselves at risk of violating the cease and desist.
Good for the Kleins. They won’t be cowed. This deserves a Supreme Court challenge on the basis of the First Amendment.
In another case, the Feds forced libertarian Reason Magazine to reveal who made negative comments in an online article about a similar bad court ruling. The Daily Sheeplecomments:
I think we all know how crazy the comment section of any website can get. If you’ve used the internet for more than five minutes in your entire life, you know that anonymity creates an environment where people can say whatever they want; and sometimes, the things they say can get pretty heated. But no matter how vindictive, blustering, or threatening a comment may be, it’s pretty rare for the commenter to act on it in the real world.
But try telling that to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. According to an editor for Reason.com, they were subpoenaed by the court after they published an article on the prosecution of Ross Ulbricht. Some of the readers had blasted Judge Katherine Forrest with comments like, she should be “taken out back and shot” and “I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for that horrible woman” among other colorful phrases. The court then tried to force Reason.com to release all information that would identify the commenters “such as IP addresses, names, emails, and other information.” They were later issued a gag order, and weren’t allowed to share this fact with anyone, or even the fact that they were under a gag order.
The editor has since contended that none of the comments were genuine threats, and that the court’s reaction was completely unnecessary. He even suggests that the court issued the subpoena to punish them for their critical analyses of the trial. I wouldn’t put it past them.
My third example this month is the proposed Arizona law that tries to criminalize internet speech that would “Terrify, Intimidate, Threaten, Harass, Annoy or Offend.” What comment couldn’t be labeled as annoying or offensive? Mac Slavo comments on thisand the new government internet snooping software(BOT) that seeks to collect and catalog potential hate speech—criminalizing thoughts and expressions
Arizona House Bill 2549 has been sent to Governor Janice Brewer’s desk and, once signed, will expand the State’s telephone harassment law to include all electronic or digital communications.
Telephone harassment laws generally apply to two individuals speaking on a telephone, but …because the bill is not limited to one-to-one communications, H.B. 2549 would apply to the Internet as a whole, thus criminalizing all manner of writing, cartoons, and other protected material the state finds offensive or annoying.
Under this legislation the very act of writing (or recording) an opinion piece, criticism or politically incorrect viewpoint could come under fire and lead to prosecution as a misdemeanor or worse. Offending someone in any of these digital meeting places to the point where they feel threatened or annoyed with you now makes you a criminal if your communications is sent from or received in the State of Arizona:
Furthermore, you can be charged with a Class 3 felony if prosecuted under Arizona’s revised stalking laws (also part of House 2549), a crime that carries a 2.5 year minimum prison sentence. Like telephone harassment laws, stalking has now been broadly defined by the ‘course of conduct’ you employ while you annoy or offend people.
Then Slavo correctly warns about government getting into the tracking of “hate” speech:
With the capability to intercept every digital communication sent over the internet or telephone it’s no surprise that Big Brother is pushing to further expand its role in the lives of Americans.
Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) is proposing a new bill that would send government web bots across the internet looking for hate speech or material allegedly determined to be advocating or encouraging “violent acts.” Once identified, the Congressman wants reports to be disseminated to Congress so that they can monitor, control and potentially criminalize thoughts and expressions deemed by an unknown panel of government bureaucrats to be hateful.
Senator Markey wants this obscure Federal Agency to scour these online sources… TV, radio and so on… for any speech they find threatening. He wants them to do it in connection with the Department of Justice, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and then file a report with Congress on what out there is potentially hateful and could lead to hate crimes.
The definitions for what constitutes hate speech are broad or non-existent, making such a bill that much more dangerous. According to the Examiner, “The bill does not specify what, exactly, constitutes “hate,” but given the source of the proposal, it’s not too difficult to figure out.”
A few weeks ago Senator Harry Reid of Nevada referred to protesters at Bundy Ranch as “domestic terrorists.” Since these people defied official directives and hate the idea of government overreach, would they now also fall under new hate speech guidelines being proposed by Senator Markey? Will they be added to yet another red list and flagged as persons of interest for simply posting their thoughts in a forum on the internet?
Psychiatrists are now identifying those who express their frustrations with the government as a mental illness called Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD) as per the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V). Under the new proposal from Senator Markey defiant thoughts or ideas could potentially not only leave you diagnosed as mentally ill, but also a “hater.”
Will “hate” now be deemed a terrorist activity such as making a gun gesture with your hand, purchasing ammunition, or paying cash for items at the grocery store?
ANOTHER MEDICAL DISSIDENT SUICIDED
Yes, suicide has now been turned into a verb in the USA to describe the act of killing of a person and making it out to look like a suicide—a now common occurrence. Government whistleblowers or defectors are often the targets of government assassins—who are experts at making murder look like a suicide. They messed up badly in falsifying the suicideof Clinton aide Vince Foster. And Gary Webb supposedly committed suicide with two shots to the headvia a .38 caliber pistol. How believable is that? Last month autism researcher and anti- vaccine crusader Dr. Jeff Bradstreet’sbody was found floating in a river in North Carolina with a gunshot to the chest. There was absolutely no evidence of a suicide, so why does the coroner come to such a fast conclusion without any suicide note, or other evidence?
Bradstreet made enemies in high places with his research into the link between Autism and vaccines. Somebody sent in the FDA to seize his office records and computers just before Bradstreet ended up dead. Harassment of doctors who switch to natural medicine is common. While nothing incriminating has been released from the FDA raid, it appears that the search was enough to create suspicion that Bradstreet from running from what the feds found.
Authorities say Dr. Jeff Bradstreet, who published research based on the medically disproved [that’s where the real falsification of evidence happens] claim that vaccines cause autism, has been found dead in an apparent suicide in North Carolina.
The Rutherford County Sheriff's Office said in a news release issued this week that Bradstreet died of what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest.
Bradstreet, who was from Braselton, Georgia, was found in the Rocky Broad River in Chimney Rock on June 19. His body was found by a fisherman. The sheriff's department said Tuesday that a handgun was also pulled from the river.[Bodies float a long way in a river. Finding a handgun conveniently close by in the river is a real stretch].
Bradstreet ran a clinic in Buford, Georgia. He also owned Creation's Own, a maker of dietary supplements, which he also prescribed. The Gwinnett Daily Post reports that agents from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, aided by the Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency, raided the Bradstreet Wellness Center last week. The FDA did not reveal to the paper why agents had searched Bradstreet's office.[Naturally, and they never will]
Bradstreet's family is now raising funds online to investigate his death, including "an exhaustive investigation into the possibility of foul play."
The family knows Bradstreet was anything but suicidal.
