May 35th, 1989
I’m no First Amendment scholar, but I’ll lay donuts to dollars that versus freedom of speech and freedom of religion, “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” is the least litigated of the First Amendment’s three spheres of protection**.
The reason for that? My uneducated off-the-cuff guess would be that while the majority always rules the legislative branch, it’s easy for them to forget that only unpopular and therefore minority speech needs protection. Ergo lawsuit. And inherent tensions between the free exercise and establishment clauses of freedom of religion simply demand litigation. It’s enivitable.
But we can go protest what the government is doing on each and every corner of Main Street, right? That’s what makes America great. Even our elected officials (most, anyway) know their next election chances are unduly risked by squashing open, public dissent. A right so ingrained is only infringed upon infrequently.
Citizens of China, however, are afforded no such assurances. So on the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, the People’s Republic entirely shut down Blogger, Twitter, Flickr, Bing, along with other internet sites and major email services. Meanwhile, earlier today, from NYT op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof:
China has blocked the use of "June 4" in Internet postings. So people are referring to the crackdown on "May 35."
So what’s the Chinese corollary to the Streisand Effect: One great leap forward is two humongous steps back? First the massacre, then the day after, the “tank man”:
**Second and third paragraphs of this post as originally written, re: how many protections the First Amendment offers:
[Assembly and petition can obviously operate separately, and petition for redress of grievances naturally intersects with free speech, but I still think of it as primarily three areas. All possible 1A issues, considered individually or every combination together is four factorial(4!), which leaves 24 possibilities; or, if freedom of religion is broken down into its two parts, establishment and free exercise, then five factorial is 120 combinations. Some combinations are either silly or impossible to reasonably imagine.
This is why I don’t blog more often – I tend to get bogged down in unnecessary tangents. Sure, primarily I’m lazy, but the not-so-occasional inability to stay on point has ruined many a well intended post. Neither the math nor the various convergences are germane to my point; let’s assume there are three main parts to the First Amendment, and I’ll try to finish my original thought.]
