Blog | Subscribe | Free Trial | Contact Us | Cart | Donate | Planned Giving
Log In | Search
facebook
rss
twitter
  • CURRENT
    • Winter 2023
    • NEWSworthy: What’s Happening and What It Means to You
    • Blog
    • INSISTING ON LIFE
    • Pastoral Reflections
    • About Us
    • HLF In The News
    • LIBERTY TO DO WHAT? Hadley Arkes and Rusty Reno join George McKenna June 1, 2022 in New York
  • DINNER
    • GREAT DEFENDER OF LIFE DINNER 2022
    • HOST COMMITTEE Great Defender of Life Dinner 2022
    • Great Defender of Life 2022 Dinner Ticket
    • Great Defender of Life 2022 STUDENT or PREGNANCY CENTER STAFF Ticket
    • DINNER JOURNAL ADVERTISING 2022
  • ARCHIVE
    • Archive Spotlight
    • ISSUES IN HTML FORMAT
  • LEGACY
    • Planned Giving: Wills, Trusts, and Gifts of Stock
  • SHOP
    • Cart

BLOG

1 Comment

Free Speech Prevails in Texas

14 Mar 2023
William Murchison
First Amendment, free speech, pro-life texas
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

 

Aw, come on, we know what free speech is. It’s the duly enshrined right of the Left to malign the Right as retrograde, regressive, reactionary, with some “o” words thrown in, like oppressive. Whereas the Right’s right to come back at the Left operates only in the imagination.

Or sometimes in a courtroom, where, strangely, in view of the times we inhabit, something like equity emerges from our never-ending national foofaraw over abortion—as happened in Texas recently, when the state Supreme Court provided a major win for free speech. Tell you the truth, Prof. Jonathan Turley of George Washington University first uttered those commendatory words, and I appropriated them as my own. My free speech, you know. Little else in the free speech world makes sense these days, but let that go.

The case in question concerned an attack on the claimed right of a pro-life advocate to call abortion “an act of murder with malice aforethought.”

Hot to the touch, that one! The taking of unborn life is . . . murder? So said Mark Lee Dickson and Right to Life East Texas. Up for debate before the city council of Waskom (bet you never heard of it: It’s on Texas’ extreme eastern boundary, evidently teeming with non-New York Times subscribers) was an ordinance voted on, pre-Dobbs decision, that conditionally outlawed most abortions.

Several pro-choice organizations became, predictably, hot under the collar, suing Dickson on grounds that he called them “criminal organizations” on social media due to their assistance in the provision of abortions. This was after he refused their demand for retractions. He wouldn’t play along. An appeals court saw in his slashing words a prima facie case for defamation of folk who, while engaging in support of abortion, had not “committed a crime generally, or murder specifically.”

Says Prof. Turley, a widely read and quoted free speech advocate: The court’s finding “would gut much of the First Amendment. Pro-life advocates believe that abortion is murder and have a right to state so. It is clearly political and religious expression protected by the Constitution. Just as Democrats have accused former President Trump of ‘mass murder’ due to his action on the pandemic, such overheated rhetoric is common in political discourse.”

Came the Texas Supreme Court’s turn at bat. Their honors, in finding for Dickson, hit the free speech ball out of the park. Wrote Justice Jane Bland, non-blandly: “A reasonable person, equipped with the national, historical, and temporal context, and informed by the overall exhortative nature of his posts, could not understand Dickson as conveying false information about the plaintiffs’ underlying conduct, as opposed to his opinion about the legality and morality of that conduct. A reasonable person would understand that Dickson is advancing longstanding arguments against legalized abortion in the context of an ongoing campaign to criminalize abortion, on public discourse sites used for such advocacy…”

Good for the court, we can agree: whatever futility or superfluity might be seen as framing Dickson’s censures in a rural, heavily forested quarter of a state lying more than a hundred miles from the nearest sure-’nuff metropolitan area and TV market. Debates—e.g., the abortion debate—don’t turn on bad or good motives imputed to various participants, defensibly or indefensibly. Debates seek the levers for moving opinion decisively. Which is one major reason the First Amendment affords wide latitude to those who debate this issue or that one, seeking in the dark the lever that begins at last to loosen the mighty machine of indifference and lassitude, of doubt and uncertainty.

Not the least irony of the abortion debate (to give it that rather scholastic name) is its moral character, brought in focus often as not by arguments having less to do with morality—ethical behavior—than personal claims to the right of saying or doing this or that just ’cause I want to, so there! Modern Americans can’t get their arms around an issue with philosophical and theological content, suggesting how the good life is rightly to be led.

Life! That word again! It keeps coming up wherever abortion is talked of, in whatever terms, censorious or approbatory. One possible development in the post-Roe era is the putting aside of lawyer-talk about abortion and the birth of opportunities to talk endlessly, passionately of what the whole thing is about in the first place.

That word again—life. Would you believe it?

25 people have visited this page. 1 have visited this page today.
About the Author
William Murchison

William Murchison, a former syndicated columnist, is a senior editor of the Human Life Review. He will soon finish his book on moral restoration in our time.

Social Share

  • google-share

One Comment

  1. Pingback: Wins in the Culture War : Faith Seeking Understanding

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Comments will not be posted until approved by a moderator in an effort to prevent spam and off-topic responses.

*
*

captcha *

Get the Human Life Review

subscribe to HLR

Recent Posts

Wyoming Bans Abortion Pills

22 Mar 2023

Legal Issues on Chemical Abortions

13 Mar 2023

HHS weighs declaring access to abortion a "public health emergency’

08 Mar 2023

CURRENT ISSUE

Anne Conlon Anne Hendershott B G Carter Brian Caulfield Christopher White Clarke Forsythe Colleen O’Hara Connie Marshner David Mills David Poecking David Quinn Diane Moriarty Dr. Donald DeMarco Edward Mechmann Edward Short Ellen Wilson Fielding Fr. Gerald E. Murray George McKenna Helen Alvaré Jane Sarah Jason Morgan Joe Bissonnette John Grondelski Kathryn Jean Lopez Kristan Hawkins Laura Echevarria Madeline Fry Schultz Maria McFadden Maffucci Mary Meehan Mary Rose Somarriba Meaghan Bond Nat Hentoff Nicholas Frankovich Patrick J. Flood Peter Pavia Rev. George G. Brooks Rev. Paul T. Stallsworth Stephen Vincent Tara Jernigan Ursula Hennessey Victor Lee Austin Vincenzina Santoro W. Ross Blackburn Wesley J. Smith William Murchison

Pages

  • Issues
  • Human Life Foundation Blog
  • About Us
  • Free Trial Issue
  • Contact Us
  • Shop
  • Planned Giving
  • TOPICS
  • GREAT DEFENDER OF LIFE DINNER

Follow Us On Twitter

Tweets by @HumanLifeReview

Find Us On Facebook

Human Life Review/Foundation

Search our Website

Contact Information

The Human Life Foundation, Inc.
The Human Life Review
271 Madison Avenue, Room 1005
New York, New York 10016
(212) 685-5210

Copyright (c) The Human Life Foundation.