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Saggy pants and the Constitution
Chances are the Founding Fathers, back in olden days, had no idea to what absurd lengths their Bill of Rights would be stretched. On the other hand, if you don’t go to those lengths, somebody might arbitrarily draw the line at a place that is unacceptable to the rest of us.
In other words, if you have to invoke the First Amendment to protect some youth’s right to wear his clothes in such a way that will make him feel like an idiot when somebody shows him a picture of himself twenty years later, so be it.
In the two-cents department, just because you have a right to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it. Take heavy-metal music, for example, of which I am not a fan. I do not try to stop it from being played, even when an aficionado of the genre is generous enough to share it with me at high volume while stopped at an intersection.
When treated to this largesse, I refrain from manually expressing my own Constitutionally-guaranteed First Amendment right, especially if I think said aficionado is likely to exercise his Second Amendment right to discharge his musket in my general direction.
Eventually, the light changes, and we all move on with our lives, our civil rights intact.
CHAN LOWE
Comments
Well stated.
This could not be more accurately represented. I am sick to death of the socialist paradigm that has gripped us for the past generation. How soon until the Baby-Boomers die off?
Posted by: Joe Cicalese | September 18, 2008 8:44 AM
Pretty cool except for this:
"Eventually, the light changes, and we all move on with our lives..."
Not really. Eventually we all move into gated communities to be near with people more like ourselves so that our young daughters don't have to look at some dude's underwear while he's strolling down the street. Why? Because we all know that there's something wrong with a culture that allows that kind of stuff but we're all too afraid to do anything about it. Then, to make ourselves feel better we hide behind an interpretation of the law the Founding Fathers would have very obviously disagreed with. It beats discharging our own musket.
Posted by: FormFactor | September 18, 2008 11:24 AM
I am a fan of the American composer Alan Hovhannes. He wrote something called "And God created great whales", where he used actual whale sounds. My wife liked it, so I made her a a tape of that to keep in her car when she went to work. Occasionally, at a stop light, she would be next to someone playing his car stereo at full volume. She would put on that tape and turn up the volume. When the man in the next car turned to look, she would pound on the back seat with a rolled-up newspaper, shouting, "Down boy! Down!"
Posted by: Edgar R. Schneider | September 18, 2008 3:37 PM
Creative response, I love it.
Instead of worrying about our First Amendment rights being trampled, we should do as R. Schneider suggests, get back at violators in a way that shows them how foolish they are, because we can be too.
I always knew South Florida was full of Looney Tunes, now it's confirmed.
Posted by: Alan Fundt | September 19, 2008 8:25 AM