A litmus test of your 1st Amendment rights

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/us/08churchill.html?ref=us

http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_12769291

So sorry, you don't have any!

Nothing prevents Ward Churchill from writing his books and screeching on any given street corner. The taxpayers of Colorado don't need to fund his rantings or his plagiarism. Nobody ever said that you can exercise your 1st Amendment rights without consequences for your words.

Plus, college professors don't deserve tenure. No one else in American society has tenure.

Erwin Miller said:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/us/08churchill.html?ref=us

http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_12769291

So sorry, you don't have any!

No Erwin; our 1st Amendment rights are well and good. The Churchill case actually proves it. If the Bill of Rights did not exist, Churchill would have been jailed for his “little Eichmann” comments. If your opinion were correct; “that anyone of us can be ferreted out for our political views and persecuted…” Churchill would be dead or in a slave camp right now.

David Lane was paid to make this appear to be a First Amendment case. It was the only card he had to play since Churchill's academic fraud and plagiarism are well documented. Lane did a good job in the courtroom and convinced a majority of the jurors that Churchill was fired for his unpopular political comments. Those are about the only folks he convinced. You are perhaps the first Coloradan I have met who believes the spin that Churchill was fired for the political content of his speech.

The fact that he called attention to himself by outrageous political speech is just the way it goes. After Churchill was fired, he and his attorney hid behind the 1st Amendment to deflect attention from the real facts. If Churchill had not been a bombastic political trash talker his firing would have been uncontroversial and little observed. Just because someone enjoys exercising his 1st Amendment rights way beyond the bounds of human decency does not mean that he is then forevermore immune from well founded charges of academic fraud and plagiarism.

Jim