Charles Krauthammer is crying the blues on "Thought Police." What Krauthammer doesn't get is that people are entitled to their own opinions. But they are not entitled to their own facts.
Case in point -- it is settled science that man-made activities can and do affect the climate and cause extreme weather. Now, nobody is saying that you have to believe that the earth is flat or that man-made activities cause climate change. Nobody is saying that we should abolish the First Amendment. If they were, then I would join Krauthammer in opposing that.
But what Krauthammer doesn't get is that there is a big difference between protecting the right to free speech and giving someone a platform. If I run a business, a newspaper, say, then I have just as much of a free speech right not to give someone a platform to deny science or to advocate for a return to the doctrine that the earth is flat. Surely Krauthammer, who has a strong background in medicine, would not want the Washington Post to give a regular platform to the advocates of vaccine denial.
His other example is gay marriage. Once again, this has been settled debate. People are born that way. We can no more change their sexual orientation than we can their skin color. Again, Brendan Eich is entitled to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. But since he made his views on marriage public (after all, according to the Roberts Court, money is free speech), shareholders of Mozilla and customers had every right to wonder whether his public stance would translate into prejudice when it came to the hiring, firing, and promotion of Mozilla employees.
While freedom of speech is the law of the land, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. I don't have the right to call my boss a vulgar term and expect to keep my job. The boss would have every right to tell the secretary to cut me a paycheck and tell me that my services are no longer needed. And freedom of speech is not freedom from disapproval. People have the right to champion a flat earth. And the rest of us have just as much right to express our disapproval.
Or let me put it another way -- do we have to stay silent everytime Rush Limbaugh makes a sexist comment against women? That would seem to me to be the same sort of censorship that Krauthammer says he's against.
Contraception is another issue he brings up. But if Hobby Lobby doesn't want to provide contraception in its health insurance plan for employees, then they should have to designate themselves as a religious organization, not a business whose purpose is to sell goods and services to the general public. Same goes for photographers who don't wish to photograph gay weddings.
Next comes the Paycheck Fairness Act, which Krauthammer demagogues as a payoff for trial lawyers. But this is a matter of equal pay for equal work. After all, the Roberts Court says that money is speech. So the right-wing corporatists who believe the proper role for a woman is in the home are hoist on their own petard. If they pay women 70 cents on the dollar for comparable work, then based on their exercise of free speech, they are a proud partner in the War on Women.