[LSNN] Election: Democratic Committee Assistant Director Accused of Abusing Veterans

[Midsummer Night's Dream]

 

Username:  Juno   

Comment:  I get that this is the internet, but the child-like personal insults don't help anyone; insults force us to move past this without gaining anything constructive — and while that may be what the trolls want, it's not what the LS or Veterans' community needs.  Instead of an opportunity to insult, this should be taken as an opportunity to remember our long-accepted way of life, and our understanding of the constitutional guarantee to speak one's mind and share one's ideas.

 

Keep in mind that the account of the incident which I have is slightly more thorough than what's been reported.  From my understanding, Collins and friend made some comments about veterans, their participation in war, and how the veterans were prepared and trained to become "murderers" (or something of the sort; I don't have the exact phrase).  It would be wrong — even in the circumstances of an unjustified war — to say that an individual veteran is a murderer merely because they participated in war.  I suppose the exception is if the person to whom the comment was directed was court-martialed and convicted of unlawfully killing a civilian or non-combatant, and then dishonorably discharged and jailed.  But this leads to another point: while we should value the service and sacrifice of individual and honorably-discharged veterans, anyone is still free to criticize a government's basis for participating in armed conflict, justified or unjustified; anyone is free to criticize the conduct of specific military operations, including any impact on civilians in those operations.  It must be stressed that our First-Amendment understanding is that political speech — regardless of which camp it originates from, or how unpopular it might be — is protected speech, and that this protection is quite broad.  Our understanding of the First Amendment, including its limitations, is that it does not permit speech which defames another, advocates for and is likely to incite imminent lawless action.  The advocacy of lawless conduct is a well-known exception; but it is not evident in these circumstances. 

 

Similarly, a person is free to believe that unjustified wars are wrong, immoral and worthy of criticism as much as street-level violence; regardless of how mistaken one may be to equate the concept of any war with the concept of murder, their sharing of this belief is, nevertheless, protected speech.  That protected speech includes advocacy aimed at the government for forcing participation in even justified wars, particularly where the proposed justification is itself a matter of debate.  A war does not occur in a void, much like violence on the street; there are factors at play which often attract varying beliefs and varying value judgments.

 

To stifle those comparisons, and to treat these as issues happening in a void, would be to dampen the rigor of our free-speech regime; ultimately, we would be doing a disservice to suppress debates surrounding war.  While we cannot condone defaming individual veterans, we also cannot condone insulating the idea of war and participation in war from criticism.  Most importantly, we cannot use or condone the use of penalties — be they criminal penalties or only professional penalties affecting one's livelihood — to stifle that criticism, just as we cannot allow the same to stifle other forms of political speech. 

 

It is easy for us, especially if we are not careful, to abuse the sacrifices that are often passionately invoked; it is easy to shade them a particular way and use those sacrifices to otherize those with whom we disagree.  It is easy, but it would be wrong to do and allow any of that.  These sacrifices we passionately speak of were not in the service of any particular camp; they were not aimed at allowing one camp to control the ideas of the day, and subjugate the other with the suppression of their speech by force or penalties; they were not made so that only Democrats' or Republicans' speech is the only protected speech.  We enjoy our guarantees, courtesy of those sacrifices, so that anyone can contribute their own ideas or shares the ideas of others.