Molly Ivins Quotes
We often seem to be swimming through such a miasma of sexual violence - in advertising, television programming, heavy metal, rap, films, and worst of all, in the home - that even First Amendment absolutists sometimes daydream about how nice it would be to have government-as-nanny just outlaw all this effluent.
Ivins, Molly. Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? Random House, 1991.
The evils of the time were even worse than in modern times. Most newspapers, journals, and periodicals were in 1835 actually owned and operated by political parties or people totally identified with political parties. In modern times, there are publications and blogs which are controlled by political forces, but most are not.
This seemingly logical inconsistency is actually typical of many nations and cultures that practice censorship. Freedom in this is a concept of a limited freedom—limited to what is reasonable, not harmful, not offensive. So all are free to behave within a circumscribed set of norms. By this logic, freedom is not being curtailed if the state acts to stop activity beyond those norms. Every nation accepts this principle to some extent. In America one “cannot should fire in a crowded theater” but there are very few other restrictions. But in Germany, Israel and other modern Industrial democracies there is censorship of material that promotes ethnic hatred whereas in the U. S. that is protected from censorship. In China many sites on the Internet have material that is regarded as inflammatory, or slanders the government and this is bad because people might lose confidence in their government. So freedom of speech and censorship issues are matters of degree with the United State being at one end of the scale and North Korea and Saudi Arabia being at the other end. China has been moving from the North Korean end of the scale towards the middle.
For example, most of the documents that are classified as secret in the CIA are so classified because the censor thought the information might be damaging to the CIA’s interest, not the American citizen’s. However, there is a strange logic that is sometimes given to justify censoring material that would embarrass the agency: If the agency is embarrassed, public support and confidence in the agency will be eroded, and that in turn will cause investigations, reviews, and possible diminished budgets. This would be distracting from the agency’s mission of keeping Americans safe, so the public should be kept in the dark about embarrassing material.
Mary Tyler "Molly" Ivins was an American newspaper columnist, author, political commentator, and humorist.
