Video of two guys in hats discussing the First Amendment in the Internet age

It’s long been a tenet of the gun grabbers that the Founders could not possibly have envisioned machine guns and nuclear weapons when they penned that short-sighted Second Amendment.

Now, along comes an argument that the Founders could not possibly have envisioned the ugly, intrusive, anything-goes, anything-can-be-said-about-anyone Internet when they embraced the First Amendment.

Exhibit 1 for this contention is the posting online of a map showing names, addresses and occupations of contributors to California’s Proposition 8 outlawing gay marriage. Contributors in favor of passage, many on whom have been threatened and harassed, have gone to court seeking anonymity.

On another front here in Nevada, a Reno family court judge testified in front of a legislative committee this past week, arguing judges need to be exempt from revealing for public records, many of which are posted online, such information as their home addresses. He also argued for enhanced penalties against those who commit violent crimes against judges.

Like many founding era pamphleteers who used various pseudonyms, as in the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, people on the Internet can usually maintain a level of anonymity, which often emboldens them to make claims they might not dare to make if their own names and reputations were attached.

Recently, a high school student was disciplined for calling her school administrators douchebags in a blog posting off campus on her Web site. The courts found speech made on the Internet off campus can easily be heard on campus. I guess that would be like standing off campus but shouting through the fence.

The Supreme Court has long held that speech cannot be regulated for its content, even offensive or profane or obscene speech.

The justices specifically said in Reno v. UCLA that the Communications Decency Act, which was intended to protect minors online from pornography, was unconstitutional for that very reason. In trying to protect minors it effectively banned such speech for adults.

“Regardless of whether the CDA is so vague that it violates the Fifth Amendment, the many ambiguities concerning the scope of its coverage render it problematic for First Amendment purposes,” the court ruled. "For instance, its use of the undefined terms ‘indecent’ and ‘patently offensive’ will provoke uncertainty among speakers about how the two standards relate to each other and just what they mean. The vagueness of such a content based regulation … coupled with its increased deterrent effect as a criminal statute … raise special First Amendment concerns because of its obvious chilling effect on free speech.”

Just because the Internet affords every mean-spirited jerk a bullhorn does not mean it is time for the rest of us to have our free speech rights reined in. The answer for speech you don’t like is more speech, speech that shames the offender and causes others to shun him. The courts and cops and lawmakers should keep their noses out of it.

The Founders knew what they were doing. They were accustomed to rough and tumble anonymous speech. Our presumption that those were gentile times is naive and displays abundant ignorance of history.

And the risks were real. They hanged people for treason.

Or, to put it another way: