October Editorial Winner

'It's the First Amendment, stupid': Judge

By David Stringer, The Lawton Constitution

It’s stunning to contemplate the political flexibility that exists in the nation today. Too many elected officials will rail against corruption, demonizing a person in another party, only to claim a miscarriage of justice if they or one of their allies puts themselves in similarly uncomfortable positions. At best, you’ll hear crickets or, worse, attack the good work of others simply doing their jobs.

The same can be said for opinions related to any number of issues these days. We’re ready to attack pork barrel projects of others, while defending our own requests as vital to the economic well-being 
of the area. Or the wasteful actions of FEMA helping disaster victims. But if there’s a disaster here, they darned well better be on the ground before the winds have even died down.

It leaves you wondering if some of these folks have any skeletal structure at all as they twist themselves into positions a contortionist would be proud of. So it’s heartening to see someone get called out on their disingenuousness and their purely political motivations exposed.

We’re talking about the state of Florida.

The issue happens to be a campaign to overturn the state’s six-week ban on abortion. Voters will soon go to the polls to weigh in but the state took to threatening TV stations that aired commercials supporting the change in law. Simply, to protect their position, they seek to silence the opposition.

The state health department, which opposes the change, sent cease and desist letters to stations stating the ads were “false” and “misleading.” Hello? It’s political advertising. And though it often makes us uncomfortable as well, political speech has been given the widest of berths by the courts.

It’s also interesting that the health department’s general counsel who sent the cease-and-desist letters since resigned stating that “a man is nothing without his conscience,” and adding “it has become clear in recent days that I cannot join you on the road that lies before the agency.”

It’s not lost on us that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill in 2021 to push back on what was termed as 
“guaranteed protection against Silicon Valley’s elites.” He said at the time “Many in our state have experienced censorship and other tyrannical behavior firsthand in Cuba and Venezuela. If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable.”

Yet, three years later, the state seeks to censor speech it disagrees with. It’s hard to be any more twisted than that: We oppose censorship … unless you disagree with us. Then you need to hush.

The First Amendment protects speech, almost absolutely. And that’s a good thing. People — and especially governments — shouldn’t be able to silence the opposition, a point DeSantis made in 2021. But facts are stubborn things. Sometimes you just can’t make them go away.

The judge’s ruling said the effort was “viewpoint dis-crimination,” a nice way of saying censorship. Even better, the ruling cited Thomas v. Collins, (323 U.S. 516, 545 (1945) (Jackson, J., concurring) stating “The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech, and religion. “In this field every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.”

Even better, we had to chuckle as we applauded his summation: “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”