Every voter wants ethical candidates, i.e., candidates whose
ethics the voter approves. The American approach has been
unfettered assembly, speech and petition, in theory at least, since
the proposal to amend the Constitution to add the first Ten
Amendments (i.e., the Bill of Rights). The theory is in our
democracy, unlike the free speech practiced in the former USSR,
that there are no sacred cows, nobody above the law, but nobody
beneath it either.
Editor,
Every voter wants ethical candidates, i.e., candidates whose ethics the voter approves. The American approach has been unfettered assembly, speech and petition, in theory at least, since the proposal to amend the Constitution to add the first Ten Amendments (i.e., the Bill of Rights). The theory is in our democracy, unlike the free speech practiced in the former USSR, that there are no sacred cows, nobody above the law, but nobody beneath it either. Some Founding Fathers predicated anarchy and chaos a la Robespierre and the Terror long before the French Revolution. But others, including Jefferson, believed that though we might temporarily go astray, the democracy would correct itself, which is why he believed that newspapers were more important than the government itself.
Our touchstone is succinctly given by John Stuart Mill, which is why we gladly tolerate fools rather than miss some idea which we otherwise might have overlooked: “But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
Joseph P. Thompson,Tres Pinos
