How can America celebrate Independence Day when situations like those that snarled Justin Carter, a 19-year old Texas gamer, in a web of fear and terror–even when nothing condemned him except a joke told in poor taste–is being slammed with felony charges and threatened with being locked up for 10 years or more?
In free countries such as the United States, one is permitted to be a fool. The keystone of our virtuous departure from the damnable norms of human history is the axiom, so memorably put by Chesterton, that “to have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.” Americans may scream racial epithets, attack others’ deeply held beliefs, and communicate whatever vile and cretinous things pop into their heads. And they may do this not because they are “allowed to” by a state that grants privilege but because the state has never been granted the permission to intervene. The heirs to the constitutional settlement of the late eighteenth century are as entitled to its bounties as were its architects — idiot boys included. Source: Free Justin Carter Now
Let’s not hold an immature, 19 year old gamer responsible for a tasteless remark.
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