by Earl Mcgill

Created on: April 17, 2008

The first article of the Bill of Rights states, in part, that " Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech." Taken literally, this means that the United States Constitution forbids government from censoring speech even to the slightest degree, which also makes the answer to the question, an unequivocal "never."

Censorship is, and will always be, an instrument of tyranny.

Unfortunately, freedom of speech in America is, in Shakespeare's words "More honor'd in the breach than the observance." While we continually beat our drums, comparing our freedoms to those in oppressed, despotic cultures, we are routinely controlled, manipulated, reprimanded, disparaged, and insulted for the words we choose or the way we put them together. Repression of speech in the United States is not the exception; it is the rule. And because we fail to recognize this reality, we are cave dwellers when it comes to genuine freedom of speech.

Blaming the government for the prevailing restrictions to free speech, however convenient, would be inaccurate.

This is not to absolve government. History is rife with examples of government censorship that has oftentimes been blatantly carried out by public book burnings. The usual rationale was that the books contained seditious or (as with the Nazis) "degenerate" teachings. Theocracies have routinely destroyed or banned written material because of its heretical, blasphemous or prurient content. In some instances, irreplaceable records of a cultural heritage were forever lost, as in the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, and the Mayan codices by Spanish Conquistadors and priests. As late as 1988 we witnessed the Muslim riots and burning of Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses." Recently and closer to home, there have been church-directed burnings in New Mexico, South Carolina, and Iowa of (preposterously) Harry Potter books.

On March 19, 2003, Federal Judge Lloyd George ordered author Irwin Schiff to stop selling his book, "The Federal Mafia." In a statement to a Las Vegas newspaper, Schiff said (in part), "There is no legal basis whatsoever for banning my book. Its all contrived, it's bull*t." In and of itself, Schiff's statement is somewhat telling. While decrying the government's apparent censorship, either he or the newspaper censored a particular word. Although there is little comparison as to degree of importance, it nevertheless illustrates how censorship has so taken hold of the American mentality that it's scarcely recognized.

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