I am now depicted as a former good-guy lawyer, i.e., a “First Amendment lawyer,” who lost his halo, fell in with bad company…and…revealed his lack of wit by ignoring the Free Speech Mafia and suing an Internet saint. – Charles Carreon
One of the most rewarding results of my increasing internet presence has been the opportunity to make the acquaintance of other well-known bloggers and public figures who use their platforms to fight for what they believe in; had I realized there were so many I would’ve started blogging back in the autumn of 2004, when I first really began to explore the whole internet thing beyond the confines of a few commercial and informational websites. But despite my tardy arrival, I’ve been accepted into the community of those who care enough about human rights to devote considerable amounts of their own (uncompensated) time to the struggle, and to my great amazement and delight I have discovered that a larger fraction of them than I had previously imagined are lawyers.
From the time I was old enough to understand what censorship was, I’ve considered it loathsome in the extreme; it’s bad enough that busybodies want to tell other people what they can do, but telling them what they can think or say crosses over the line from garden-variety control-freakishness to full-blown mental illness. At one time, would-be censors were merely a very vocal minority in the US, but in recent years they’ve become far more numerous and powerful, even to the point where many who could be expected to fight them (such as journalists) are instead joining them, effectively declaring themselves mental incompetents who need to be told by their “betters” what they should be allowed to see and hear. The most common excuse nowadays (beside the nebulous “national security”) is the imagined emotional fragility of women and children; we are repeatedly told that speech or images some people don’t like must be censored to “protect” their delicate psyches from discomfort.
But the more offensive something is, the more important that it be protected, even if we disagree with it ourselves; because this is counterintuitive to so many people nowadays, it’s vital that those of us who understand it work together to defeat any and all efforts to suppress speech. This makes us seem rather fanatical to some, while others whose attempts at censorship are vigorously opposed may go as far as to cast us as members of some sinister cabal (in the exact same way prohibitionists malign sex worker activists by pretending we’re members of an imaginary “pimp lobby”). Hence today’s title, thoughtfully provided by Charles Carreon (whose attempts to censor every critic of his attempts to censor a popular cartoonist are already the stuff of legend). Carreon represented a website who tried to use a creative (that’s a nice way of saying “assholy”) interpretation of trademark law to censor said cartoonist (Matthew Inman, AKA “The Oatmeal”) and make a profit in the bargain, but was defeated (that’s a nice way of saying “buried”) by said “Free Speech Mafia”, who represented Inman pro bono (that’s a legal way of saying “for free”).