It occurs to me that we need some common sense regulation to prevent the tragedies in Orlando and Dallas. The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact and the 1st Amendment extremists need to compromise for the safety of everyone.
The five dead and nine wounded in Dallas was predictable, preventable, and should never happen again. All it would take would be a small amount of compromise by the extremists in this country who refuse to consider the most common-sense measures that almost everyone can agree on.
Nearly the same thing can said about the 49 murdered and 53 wounded in Orlando last month. Something like that is entirely predictable and preventable.
Here’s what everyone with a shred of common sense can obviously agree on:
- The whole “black lives matter” talk should have been shut down as soon as the emotions started getting hostile. Yes, the 1st Amendment says we have a right to free speech but that was before social media, text messages, and email. Bad ideas can travel so fast that people don’t have a cooling off period before a critical mass has formed and we have mass demonstrations before the hot heads get a chance to think thing through. The 1st Amendment was fine when mass distribution of dangerous ideas by common folk meant standing on a soap box in the town square and hoping someone would listen to you.
- There are virulent strains of both Christianity and Islam are literally deadly to the LGBT community. Again, the 1st Amendment is perceived as a block to common sense regulation by the 1st Amendment extremists. But that was a time when homosexuality not seen for what it is. We now know that, at worst, it is minor quirk of nature in expression of one’s sexual desires that is almost entirely harmless. It’s time to put an end to the violence. All reasonable people must agree that all writings and speech which speak ill of alternate expressions of sexuality or gender must be banned and vigorously rooted and and destroyed. Yes, people have a 1st Amendment right to religion. But there are lots of religious to choose from which are not so dangerous. And the extremists almost never mention the first part of the 1st Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” My common sense proposal doesn’t establish a religion. It merely bans a small subset of religions that are incompatible with modern day society. So how can my proposals possibly be considered as an infringement? It’s just common sense.
Thousands of lives each year of depend upon these sort of common sense laws. We can respect the 1st Amendment and yet save countless lives every year if we don’t let the extremists get in our way.
[end sarcasm]