PrintJuly 1, 2010
Every right can be misused
At Reason.com, Jacob Sullum puts a lethal round into the old, lame, liberal arguments that our 2d Amendment right to keep and bear arms can result in criminal use of firearms with this statement:
Every right can be abused, with results that are immoral, illegal, or both. Freedom of speech can be used to spread hateful ideas, promote pernicious political philosophies, slander the innocent, or engage in criminal conspiracies. If there were no potential for harm from exercising a right, there would be no need to protect it, because no one would try to restrict it.
I would go so far to say that even the freedom to worship can be abused with results that are illegal, immoral or both as exemplified by the nutcase preacher Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church from Topeka, Kansas, who vilify our military dead, and the hateful, anti-Semitic Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his "Goddamn America" sermons, which our president, through some miracle of divine unengagement, somehow never heard.
As Mr. Sullum so pointedly reminds us, there is no right which cannot be bent into a wrong.
