Friday, March 4, 2011

One

I have been thinking a lot, about words and what they can do to people. The supreme court in the states has ruled that the Westboro Baptist Church can continue to picket the funerals of dead soldiers. While I understand that the right to free speech is important, there should be some sort of line drawn in the sand, shouldn't there? Should your right to free speech allow hate speech? Argue what you want, the signs that say "God Hates Fags" are hate speech and I wonder if they were saying the same thing about another minority if that would be allowed to stand.

But Westboro is not the main thought in my head right now. No, that place is reserved for thoughts about honesty. The people whom I know who are the most honest, are also the most hurtful people I know.

We live in a world of extremes, where people clamor for black and white categorizations and don't understand that between honesty and deceit there is something called 'tact'. In between complete free speech and complete censorship there is a happy medium where people are allowed to say what they want as long as it's not unmitigated hate speech.

Personally, I'd like to see some more people in the media's spotlight talking about the shades grey in between the two sides of an issue rather than the politicization and sensationalizing that we so often see.

1 comment:

  1. JJones: I had no idea about that, so thank you for sharing it with me. I am not a fan of any form of extremism, but I suppose it's because of the 24 hour news networks that we get so much more coverage of Westboro right now. I've been following them for years though.

    As horrific as the things they say are, the fervor of their claims is fascinating to me.

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