Who Will Defend the First Amendment?

Just saying you can read the constitution and get an answer is a major over simplification. Just look at the second amendment. People here have argued what those short sentences mean for tens of thousands of posts on this site alone. How would that get worked out without a final court decision?

Got any proof to the contrary, send it on up.

In any case, allowing an invocation in a legislative session differs greatly in coercive effect from, say, having a teacher open a class in a public school with a prayer. The majority opinion did nothing to displace existing precedents that limits prayer in public schools.

If there were sufficient proof by even a preponderance of the evidence, Hill could have filed and won a civil suit.

The Town Council, the majority reasoned, were mature adults and would feel no particular coercion regardless of the particular invocation given.

But that does not mean the Constitution should be changed necessarily.

Is NBC under some gag order NOT to use the two words muslim, and terrorist in the same sentence? Is the use of the word terrorist now reserved for citizens here? Or is this all stomping on the first amendment?

Thomas denied Hill's accusations, few witnesses were called to support her (she wasn't the nominee) and the nominee was confirmed, 52 to 48. But that didn't settle the mystery at the heart of those hearings. In front of the whole country and under oath, one of two people had lied. Since one of those people is now a Supreme Court Justice who cast a vote making George W. Bush President, the point is far from moot. And last week the mystery took another turn, thanks to former American Spectator character assassin David Brock, the man designated by the right to destroy Hill's reputation and scrub Thomas'. Brock confesses in a Talk magazine excerpt of his new book, Blinded by the Right, that he had printed "virtually every derogatory and often contradictory allegation" he could to make Hill seem "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty." If that was all Brock did, we might have nothing more than another sin committed on behalf of the vast right-wing conspiracy. But Brock, who has forged a second career as a recovering conservative, makes one admission that implicates Thomas. Brock says he used information that came indirectly from Thomas to force a retraction from a woman named Kaye Savage, who had come forward in support of Hill. Brock threatened to publicize vicious charges made by her ex-husband in a sealed child-custody dispute.

In an interview with TIME last week, Savage recalled her meeting with Brock in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington in 1994Bold Text. A book titled Strange Justice, by reporters Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, had just come out — and it used on-the-record interviews to argue persuasively that Thomas had indeed subjected a number of women to frequent sexually explicit remarks about porno videos. Savage, a black mid-level aide in the Reagan Administration, told both the authors and the Judiciary Committee (although she wasn't called to testify publicly) that when she went to Thomas' apartment in the early 1980s, the place was littered with graphic photos of nude women. When Savage met Brock, she says, he let her know he could ruin her. "He knew all this personal stuff," she says. "He wanted me to take back what I had said. I couldn't — it was true — but I was intimidated, and so I faxed him something innocuous. I was scared."

Yes you explanation helps a great deal but it is very complex and sometimes "fuzzy" territory. Thank you for sharing your insights. It seems, that the element of "coercion" is a key player in this whole dilemma.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.[2]

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish......

I like the Pledge of Allegiance. It was written by a socialist.