Judge Sotomayor on First Amendment:

[elleng]

'In a 2002 dissent, Judge Sotomayor said she would have ruled that the First Amendment has a role to play in protecting anonymous racist communications made by a police officer. Saying she found the communications “patently offensive, hateful and insulting,” Judge Sotomayor nonetheless would have allowed the officer’s case against the police department that fired him to proceed to trial.

She said the majority should not “gloss over three decades of jurisprudence and the centrality of First Amendment freedoms in our lives because it is confronted with speech it does not like.”'

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/us/politics/27judge.html?_r=1&hp

[rucky]

1. She's right.

sorry if that doesn't sit well with some.

[Orrex]

2. I thought that the first amendment only protected the pleasant things that people say?

Shows what I know! :evilgrin:

[ProgressiveProfessor]

4. If it offends or lessens someone's self esteem, its not protected speech

I actually heard that in a discussion of what should be allowed on the university campus. I was dumbstruck

[Orrex]

6. Yikes!

The dangerous times we live in!

[ZombieHorde]

7. You should have told that person that their words offended you

and therefore, by that person's logic, should be illegal.

Then you should have eaten them.

[davsand]

3. Yep. The more offensive I find it, the harder I need to fight to protect it.

She is EXACTLY where she needs to be on that issue.


Laura

[TahitiNut]

5. People are fired for "speech" every day.

Try talking demeaningly about your employer or your boss ... and the "at will" employment proviso becomes very immediate.

In fact, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" seems to have a LOT of speech-related aspects. :eyes:

[nolabels]

9. There is a rationality missing when words are more important than anything else.

She has an objective mind, the true makings of a liberal. In that opinion she has qualified speech as not omni-important which must really scare the hell out of the wingers


She kind of reads like a loose cannon so i hope it doesn't get her trouble during the process, at any rate this should be fun :-)

[AlexanderProgressive]

8. If she was wrong, Lou Dobbs and Limbaugh would be locked up

Among others.