The First Amendment: A Mother-Fucking Civics Lesson

As a creative-type person, as well as someone universally-recognized as having a big mouth, I’m a fan of the First Amendment. In fact, you could say it’s my favorite of all the Amendments, particularly the Top Ten. Not to take anything away from the others, like the Third Amendment, for instance, preventing the quartering of troops and ensuring I’m not up to my elbows in enlisted men, tromping around using my favorite coffee mug and wearing my Muppet t-shirts. And, well, of course, the ever-popular Ninth Amendment, which protects our rights not otherwise enumerated, or as Swan referred to it in Winslow’s Phantom of the Paradise contract, “All excluded shall be henceforth deemed included.” But the First Amendment, really, is the one nearest and dearest to my heart.

For those who might be unfamiliar with this Big Daddy Number One of Amendments to our United States Constitution, which seems to include nearly all Americans (“If you like to invoke the Constitution and America’s founders, without having the faintest idea about either one, you just might be an American.”; “If you demand that Government refrain from instituting socialized medicine and in the same breath herald your sacred Medicare… you just might be an American.”; “If you”— okay I’m done), lemme break it down for you:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Don’t like this Shakespearian dolphin language? I’ll break it down further for those in the Red States (yeah, I’m being snarky, as per my right granted by Amendment Number One):

The First Amendment guarantees all American citizens the inalienable rights to Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of the Press, the Right to Assemble and to write to your Congressmen/women/children to voice any and all complaints, no matter how weird they may be or how high your expectations that something will actually happen.

It does NOT grant you the right of freedom from any of those things. And it doesn’t give you the right to take away the same rights of other people, just because they happen to be melon-headed nimrods who know not of which they speak. If you disagree, you’re allowed to argue, to shout them down, drown them out, stick your fingers in your ears and go “la-la-la”, or, best of all, ignore them and go do something else.

“Freedom of Expression” does not mean that you can throw things at them, set them on fire, or stuff rags/fish/children into their mouths to shut them up. In short, the First Amendment does not guarantee your right to not get your feelings hurt. Offensensitivity is your problem, not the Constitution’s.

I want to point this out once and for all because we’ve all been guilty of acting like or actually being banjo-playing mouth breathers at some point in our lives: these rights apply to all Americans or, really, anyone who is touching American soil at the time of exercising said rights. If a French guy wants to stand in the middle of Times Square and scream “I surrender!” “I hate all of you American cocksuckers!” he’s allowed to. Now, the number of times he’s allowed to say this before the laws against “Disturbing the Peace” kick in is a matter of debate. But if he wants to call us cocksuckers, no matter how black his personal pot might be as compared to our shining kettles is neither here nor there. You have the freedom to not like it, but not the right to kick his teeth in, nor the right to gag him or have him arrested and his tongue cut out.

Are we clear about this?

In this wonderful place we call “America”, we all, each and every one of us, has the right to say, think, feel and write, in public or private, any goddamned thing we want, no matter how stupid that thing/thought/idea may be. It’s why Creationists, Darwinists, Moon-landing deniers, Dane Cook, fans of Dane Cook, Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Jon Stewart, and Glee’s audience all continue to co-exist more or less, if not peacefully, then with a minimum of daily bloodshed. Blood pressures can be raised, weapons cannot. Not in this case. And don’t go evoking the 2^nd Amendment because you know damn well that’s not what it means!

If you want to use a blowtorch to create an image of the Prophet Mohammed on your grilled cheese sandwich, here in the great U.S. of A., you can. I’d eat that sandwich before heading to the Middle East or certain parts of New Jersey, but it’s not like you can take it on the plane with you anyway. But as long as you’re in America, you can make as many yummy Prophet Mohammed grilled cheese sandwiches as you like. If your Muslim neighbor doesn’t like it, but resides in America, he’s perfectly within his rights to make a “Jesus Christ Masturbating to Porn” grilled cheese sandwich in protest. Neither of you are allowed to blow up the other person’s house because grilled cheese sandwiches are, in this case, protected speech.

Are we clear on this? Because I can’t move forward unless we’re clear. You, in the back, do you have a question?

Yes, telling me to “Go fuck myself” is protected speech too. So is my retort that you do the same as well as to the manner of equine conveyance upon which you arrived.

Where things get thorny with Number 1 is when the speech/expression is uttered privately or publicly. See, the part that says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of…” means that the government can’t make it illegal to say “Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot and so is Al Franken”. It can’t throw you in jail for writing for or reading the National Inquirer.

And it cannot use taxpayer money, for example, to declare one religion is better than another. It can’t declare that “All Americans, henceforth, are Druids under penalty of imprisonment”. Which is why some people get bent out of shape over Nativity scenes erected on courthouses, but no one shows up to protest an inflatable one on someone’s private lawn. Lousy taste is still protected under that “Free Speech and Expression” thing. You are granted freedom of religion, but the government really has to keep its nose out of it. You can book time on Community Access TV and read from the Bible, the Koran or the New York Times until your lungs collapse. Your mayor, elected by a majority of voters (usually 12% of a given population) cannot. He has to remain neutral. He can say that he’s a Judeo-Christian Satanist, but he’s not allowed to say that you have to be too or you can’t live here.

Is this clear? You, the citizen, is granted freedom of religion. A governing body or representative of such can’t play such favorites.

Erecting stone obelisks displaying the Ten Commandments, a hallmark of the Judeo-Christian religion, on government property, is another example of “don’t do it”, even if things start to get tricky here. It implies that the government is endorsing Moses and his ill-conceived stationary. This makes people of the non-Judeo-Christian leanings uncomfortable because they pay taxes too, and some of that money may have gone to the creation of these monuments. While said Ten Commandments sculpture itself, whether out of stone or butter, is protected artistic expression, its location is what is under debate. So its best to move it across the street and off of public property if there’s any doubt. Because “public” means “everybody”. You can’t herd everyone in a three-mile radius into a Baptist Revival Tent and you can’t keep everyone out of said tent at gunpoint.

Are we still clear?

So if you happen upon a photo of the Virgin Mary sitting on Santa’s lap, but it’s in a building owned by a person, you can’t call “Constitution!” and have it removed. But if the owners get a sufficient amount of flack from offended patrons who just won’t follow the suggestion of “don’t look at it”, and they keep getting their tires slashed (not an example of freedom of expression, fyi) and decide to take said photo down and replace it with that Magritte painting of a guy with an apple for a face, this is also not “Censorship”. The humorless creeps can’t call the cops in to force the owner remove the photo, however. An individual hung the image. The same individual removed it. It’s his wall, his building and his tires. If he wants to cave in to the demands of humorless creeps, it’s his choice.

Which brings us to the Smithsonian Institution. At the beginning of December, G. Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian, bowed to pressure from celebrated asshole (protected speech!) Catholic League President Bill Donohue and the ever-so-orange Congressman John Boehner and removed from  the National Portrait Gallery in Washington the video installation "Fire in My Belly" by the late artist David Wojnarowicz.

Wojnarowicz created the video in 1987 after the death of his mentor and lover, photographer Peter Hujar. Hujar died from AIDS-related complications and Wojnarowicz himself had recently learned that he was H.I.V.-positive himself. So “Fire in My Belly” is not a happy-go-lucky video. It’s a dark, grief-stricken and painful piece, filled with documentary images of violence as well as cultural and religious imagery making an angry statement about society, government and sacred institutions, their addiction to warfare and unrest, and a feeling of isolation from civilization, particularly institutions that are meant to bring comfort. As a way of making his point, Wojnarowicz includes among his images, a shot of ants crawling over a crucifix. The shot is broken up and in total lasts about eleven or so seconds in the film’s quarter-hour total.

The exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" featured a seven-minute excerpt of the movie alongside significant work from other homosexual artists throughout history. It was, according to official literature, “the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture”. Funded by private donations, the exhibit went up in late October and was to run through February 13. The Smithsonian Institution, as a body, operates under federal support. Meaning: taxpayer money.

The exhibit was run by private funds. The building it ran in was paid for by the public.

This wasn’t the first time that Wojnarowicz and his work came under attack. In ’89, notorious just-as-big-if-not-bigger asshole, Douglas Wildmon, a Methodist Minister and founder of the American Family Association, sent a pamphlet to Congress singling out Wojnarowicz’s work as blasphemous and/or pornographic. Because the man’s work appeared in an exhibition partly supported by the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts, public money), Wildmon frothed and seethed at what he perceived as Congress making a “law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Public money supporting the denigration of Christianity, said Wildmon, and he demanded the exhibition pulled and the NEA defunded. He did that a lot, actually. That led immediately to Wojnarowicz suing Wildmon for misrepresenting and “selectively editing” his art. Wojnarowicz won. Wildmon’s right to be offended infringed on Wojnarowicz’s rights to artistic expression. Since the NEA is constantly on the verge of defunding, nothing was really accomplished by Wildmon’s impression of Helen Lovejoy.

This time around, Clough felt it in everyone’s best interest, particularly that of the exhibit’s, if he gave in to Donohue’s outrage, who called it “hate speech”. "It is designed to insult. This is a sad commentary on the judgment of the Smithsonian." Particularly galling, aside from the eleven-second ant-appropriation of Jesus, was its depiction of homoeroticism. Homoeroticism? In an exhibit focusing on homosexuality? Outrageous!

Soon-to-be Speaker of the House and notorious “anything to get my name in the paper” chest beater, John Boehner said, through his spokesman, Kevin Smith (different guy, possibly also an asshole), "American families have a right to expect better from recipients of taxpayer funds in a tough economy. While the amount of money involved may be small, it's symbolic of the arrogance Washington routinely applies to thousands of spending decisions involving Americans' hard-earned money."

Just looking out for those hard-working Americans who have the rights to not get their feelings hurt or be made to think about things. Except, of course, that they don’t have those rights, remember?

Still, rather than risk slashed tires or more protest against the entirety of the exhibit, Clough removed the installation, saying that the outcry was “distracting” to exhibition’s message. This sparked outrage on the other side, decrying the decision as “censorship”. It wasn’t. It may have been cowardice or CYA, but it would only have been censorship had Donohue or Boehner walked in with Marines and forcibly removed the video. Neither of these two assholes did any actual removing. They bullied, they threatened. At no point were offended eyes poked out.

“Fire in the Belly” had every right to be part of the exhibition. As a private exhibition, Hide/Seek had every right to display anything it wished. And as the curator of the exhibit, Clough had every right to remove the exhibit to avoid future chest-beating and thinking-of-the-children. It wasn’t a censorship issue. Technically. The video went viral on YouTube and millions more people were exposed to it than they would have at the Washington display. This, of course, opened up a whole can of copyright infringement worms, but that’s a different essay. Other galleries across the country jumped to the late Wojnarowicz’s defense and included “Fire in the Belly” in their own show of solidarity and attempts to make a buck, including the irony-in-and-of-itself Andy Warhol Museum.

Oddly, in a further display of ill-used balls, the Smithsonian refused to remove a painting from the exhibit, one entitled “Felix, June 5, 1994”, by AA Bronson. Saying they’d had enough of bullying, the Smithsonian was putting its foot down! Except that the demand came from Bronson himself, outraged over the perceived censorship. So… there’s that. The sort of thing up with which they will not put.

Really, what Clough, Boehner and Donohue accomplished by removing “Fire in the Belly” was denying a whole host of people the opportunity to be offended by something they only vaguely understood, judging from the excerpt from the whole. If there’s one pastime that Americans love more than sports, it’s being recreationally offended.

To further illustrate our lecture of rights, I want to bring up the most odious, noxious, possibly-evil and certainly nauseating Westboro Baptist Church. Founded by Poltergeist II villain Fred Phelps, his Mist villain wife Margie, and made up primarily of their ever-breeding extended family, the Westboro Baptist Church exists to spread God’s hate to the land. With homosexuality as their particular bugaboo, they’ve declared that nearly everything that exists now or in the future is an example of God’s wrath against alternate lifestyles. With the Divine Homophobe, apparently, as their shepherd, this small but extremely loud group of the devoted enjoy little more than popping up at the funerals of soldiers and famous people with their “God Hates Fags” signs to show the world just how much, uh, God hates fags. The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars are God’s punishment too, see. Because America permits homosexuals to be alive, God sends soldiers to the foreign lands to kill them. It can be assumed that God hates fags but he loves outsourcing. “Thank GOD for dead soldiers” reads one of their most popular signs. Breast Cancer is also punishment for homosexuality. So, too, is Two and a Half Men. They also hate Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Sweden and the ambidextrous (pick a side, fag! We’re at war!). I only made one of those up. But mostly it’s those damned fags. Christ, they’re just everywhere! (Saddam Hussein and Al Gore, however, are okay. I’m being serious.)

Now, any rational person can easily write off these creeps as Bible-banging Neanderthals and ignore their hate speech if it weren’t for their utter disrespect for human beings. Remember: respect is not one of the Big Number 1’s guaranteed rights. Neither is decorum. Even the drunkenest Yahoo News-posting racist would think twice from showing up at a person’s funeral, generally considered a sad-enough occasion, and start bad-mouthing the deceased no matter how Mexican/Irish/Liberal he might have been. Not only out of a sense of human decency but, you know, self-preservation.

But the Phelps’ clan thinks that human decency is neither here nor there. It’s all beside the point. The point is… well, the point is, God hates fags. And he’s gonna kill every last one of us until there are no more fags left. If you take that ideology to the obvious conclusion, if homosexuality were bred out of the species, so too would death be eliminated. But that, of course, is nonsensical Darwinism, which is also an affront to the point-and-shoot God of the Westboro Baptist Church.

But the part that takes Phelps and his looney-toons followers from the Realm of Asshole and puts them in the Grand Duchy of Evil Fuckery is this: they don’t believe a word of their own crap.

Fags, no fags, who the fuck cares? See, Phelps and his hideous mutant offspring are predominantly lawyers. In Fred’s case, ex-lawyers, seeing as he was permanently disbarred in 1989. Their schtick is publicity and lawsuits. They love getting on TV, getting booed and hissed and adding to their hit list. They hate Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly equally. Howard Stern has Fred’s daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper and her family on semi-regularly and spends the time ridiculing them into the pavement. And they love every minute of it. They smile and wave at the camera, hold up their signs and watch as their stock in hatred and sign-making soars.

They go to funeral, solemn and grief-stricken occasions, in the hopes that one or more of the bereaved will attack them in outrage. And then, the Westboro Baptist Church will face their attackers and sue them. Because all they were doing was exercising their Freedoms: Speech, Religion, Assembly and Expression. They were the requisite 150 feet away, keeping the rancor down to a dull roar. Sometimes they’re completely silent and just wave their signs a little more emphatically when the local (and usually national) news arrives. This is what you do when you want to be a celebrity but can’t dance or juggle. You outrage. It’s all about the cash settlements and the hits on YouTube.

As The Onion reported, excerpting City of Charleston v. The Kanawha Players, “quoting” Supreme Court Justice Breyer, “It doesn’t matter how fucking annoying the speech is, nor how filthy the speech is, nor how fucking insufferable a douche-nozzle the speaker is”. Phelps’ “God Hates Fags” is protected under the Big Numero Uno A-Number-One Amendment of the United States Constitution. Whether you want to attribute the quote to Voltaire or his biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is the fundament of the First Amendment. Infamous deist, slave-owner and founding father Thomas Jefferson himself wrote this little ditty: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every from of tyranny over the mind of man.”

And whether you like it or not, attempting to silence the Westboro Baptist Church, as orgasmically satisfying and Global I.Q.-raising as it might be, that would be “tyranny over the mind of man”. Even though “man” in this case is represented by evolutionary U-turns whose routine couldn’t get them on The Gong Show if it ran following The Jersey Shore.

This, and possibly this alone, makes the United States so superior to the other menial countries on this planet. (Because it sure isn’t our healthcare.) We’re federally protected from prosecution (if not persecution) if we were to say “The United States can take its Freedom of Speech and shove it up its socialist, gay-loving ass!” We could shout that into the Grand Canyon, grandest of all canyons, and we’d be allowed to do so. Unless there’s a sign around that says “No Shouting”, which would be a blanket order and not specific to ass-shoving speech.

So it might be frustrating to have no ammunition against the shameless, gormless, worthless, dickless Phelps family, the First Amendment covers them so that it may also cover the rest of us. Small comfort, sure. But moronic ass-hat stupidity is protected speech. Protest songs, anti-homosexual tracts and mime are all protected freedoms of expression.

And so far, thank god and all homosexuals, no one has taken that away from us. 

Next week: the sticky wickets that are libel, slander and bar fights.

Sources: The Goddamned Washington Post

The Ass-Faced Smithsonian Institution 

The Mother-Raping Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Herpes-infected Wikipedia