Undercurrent

...provided he can find somewhere in his bible instructions on how to make a bow and arrow out of twigs.

m.

daemon

You found something alarming on WorldNetDaily.com? What a surprise!

Looks like a load of hyper-conservative bollocks to me.

ManM

Toto,
That is exactly what I was getting at. If you are in government, you can not express X. Maybe I should have been more clear. If you are on government time, you can not express X. How would you feel if X was a particular secular philosophy? Doesn't the entire scheme fly in the face of our freedom of speech?

Jamie_L

Read my whole post. I am attacking to aspects of Just's article. First he essentially claims secular government is equivalent to gagging politicians WRT religion. This is just not true.

Second, he says that such a gag would render government dysfunctional and deprive people of religious liberty. The excerpt you quote is me saying "OK, even if a gag was in place, which it is not, and which I do not support, the results he claims would not happen." That is, not only is his premise bogus, but the conclusion he draws is bogus.

I do not support barring elected officials from talking about their faith.

Jamie

Toto

I am not sure what you are saying. Government employees face some restrictions on their freedom of speech when they are on government time. Is there something wrong with this? School teachers who want to teach creationism in the classroom have tried to argue that they have a free speech right to do that, but they uniformly lose in court. They may have a right to speak out on creationism, but they don't have a right to be paid by the government to do so to a captive audience.

Buffman

ManM

Just as Toto points out, when you work for the government, your free speech is curtailed when you are on government time, or when you use your government position to advance your personal opinions in public even if you are on your own time. Confused? Simple! An Air Force officer just got relieved of his duties because he wrote a letter-to-the-editor that was derogatory of his Commander-in-Chief. What about his free speech rights? The U.S. Military is not a democracy. It even has its own set of laws called the Universal Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

IMHO, the U.S. Patriot Act of 2002 is little more than the first step in an anti-Constitutional UCMJ for civilians. TIPS is just another step along the path to a fascist America run by the radical right, Christian fundamentalist, CEOs. (That's an example of the freedom of speech that I didn't have for more than 20 years. I love it and will fight to keep it.)

Autonemesis

Yes it does, but blame that on the 14th Amendment and the rulings that followed from it. The 1st Amendment restricts what Congress may do. The 14th and its judicial history has stretched that concept to include any government activity. I agree that no one should leave their rights at the door when they enter their workplace, even if it is a government workplace. I do not think that the 14th Amendment was intended to trump the 1st.

So we should look at fixing the source of this problem, not the symptom. The 9th Circuit ruling is not the problem, it is the history and precedent that has flowed from the 14th which has created this quandary.

daemon

Just a note: I read this morning in the news that TIPS had been dropped. I'll look for a more detailed commentary on it.