Why Britain Needs A First Amendment
“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.”
In case you don’t recognise the above statement, it is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Passed in December 1791, it guarantees freedom of speech for American citizens and indeed everyone living or working within its borders.
The First Amendment has been under relentless attack for decades; one of the things its enemies came up with was “hate speech”. Originally based on race and/or religion, this has now been expanded to sex, sexual orientation and of late, trans. It remains to be seen if trans is a sexual orientation or a mental disability, but in the United Kingdom, it has become a big issue in recent years, none more so than after the recent arrest of Graham Linehan.
Although Irish, Linehan is very well-known in Britain as a comedy script writer and comedian. Of late, he has become known for something else - speaking out against the insanity of the trans movement. On September 1, he was arrested at Heathrow Airport after arriving on a flight from the United States. His defenders have made much of him being arrested by armed police. As armed police now routinely patrol airports, that is no big thing, but did it really take five of them to arrest him?
He was kept in a cell for a prolonged period, and, not an entirely well man, he ended up being taken to hospital.
Linehan’s alleged crime is posting three messages on Twitter, X, or whatever it is called this week. The content of these messages will not be repeated here, suffice it to say they were extremely mild and nothing like as inflammatory as the front page of Class War newspaper alluded to in this recent article.
Linehan is clearly being targeted by trans activists; he claims this hate campaign was responsible for ending his marriage.
If the abuse of Britain’s anti-free speech laws, in this case harassment and malicious communications legislation, has attracted widespread condemnation, the abuses of so-called race relations legislation has attracted far less over the decades. The willingness of the police to arrest easy targets for non-crimes and of prosecutors to ride with them is not only a stain on justice but a disgraceful waste of resources.
While the police are spending untold hours on such cases, real crimes are going unsolved and even uninvestigated. Indeed, there have been a number of instances recently in which people have tracked their stolen chattels, informed the police of the location, and the police have refused to have anything to do with them,
Leaving all that aside, if Graham Linehan or anyone else hated transsexuals, blacks, Jews, or any other minority, does dragging such people into court make them hate them less, or more?
Unlike the United States, Britain does not have a written constitution, but it needs one. It also needs to abolish all these pernicious “anti-hate” laws. If the United States could survive without them for well over two centuries, so can Britain.