Let PBS Believe In God, Not The Taxpayer
November 24, 2005
The establishment of “The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967” is unconstitutional and all public funding of the CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting), PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) and NPR (National Public Radio) should immediately cease. The government funding of the CPB and its affiliates violates a sane person’s right to be free from coercive propaganda. For those of you who might consider this nutty, please dumb-down to the level of U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton and learn to read the First Amendment through the eyes of this judicial analphabet.
For those of you who might have missed it, Jimmy Carter appointee, Lawrence Karlton, is the village idiot who, along with “America's best known atheist” Michael Newdow: (1) escaped from an alien spacecraft; (2) disguised himself as an American and (3) believes that the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional. Rivaling “cruel and unusual punishment”, Karlton found that the pledge's reference to One Nation "Under God" violated public school students’ right to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God".
Of course, the same people who find “God” so offensive see nothing wrong with publicly funded propaganda like PBS’s airing of It's Elementary, a film designed to teach elementary school children that homosexual behavior is normal. And...there’s the rub.
The Non-Holy Grail of the secularist left is the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. You know, that little part of the First Amendment that states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof....” Based on this, creatures like Karlton and Newdow (who have as much useful purpose in life as a fly at a picnic) see a superhighway to their goal of eliminating God from everything that indirectly or directly receives a sou of government funding.
Unlike Judge Karlton and “activist” Newdow, honest people with no agendas would read this clause any number of ways and all come to the same conclusion...that secularism has become a religion which empowers the tyranny of an insignificant minority to destroy American culture. But let’s grant that as a given.
Since the First Amendment has become such a nifty little jingle for these secularists, we might as well quote some more of it and see where it leads, “...(Congress shall make no law) abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press....” OK my fellow Niggas (forgive me for exercising my secularly unabridged freedom of speech), let’s employ some twisted secularist logic to this clause and see what comes of it.
In WALZ v. TAX COMMISSION OF CITY OF NEW YORK, SCOTUS found that, “[F]or the men who wrote the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment the 'establishment' of a religion connoted sponsorship, financial support, and active involvement of the sovereign in religious activity.” Since the entire First Amendment is a single sentence, wouldn’t this same logic hold true for freedom of the press (especially the part about NO FINANCIAL SUPPORT)?
How does this sound, “[F]or the men who wrote the Free Press Clause of the First Amendment the 'establishment' of a free press connoted NO sponsorship, NO financial support, and NO active involvement of the sovereign in media activity.” Whoohoo...the $400 million in taxpayer money (plus hundreds of millions in tax breaks and state funding) given to the CPB annually is a violation of our First Amendment rights.
In UNITED STATES et al. v. UNITED FOODS, INC., SCOTUS found that “Although respondent is required simply to support speech by others, not to utter speech itself, that mandated support is contrary to the First Amendment principles set forth in cases involving expression by groups which include persons who object to the speech but, nevertheless, must remain group members by law or necessity”. This is a case where United Fruit claimed that a law requiring mandatory tax assessments for generic mushroom advertising violated its First Amendment right to free speech because United Fruit objected to what was being said.
If SCOTUS found a violation of United Fruit’s First Amendment rights because United Fruit objected to what was being said, how about the violation of First Amendment rights for all of those who disagree with the content and bias of PBS?
From a total of 110.2 million households, PBS viewership is consistently 2 percent or less. What about the First Amendment rights of the other 98 percent. With more than 80 percent of Americans being Christians and 96 percent of Americans celebrating Christmas, courts have had no problem protecting the First Amendment rights of a few gadflies by banning nativity scenes on public property and the singing of Christmas carols in public schools. Yet millions of Americans who object to public television programming are forced to pay tax dollars used to trample their First Amendment rights “in the public interest”.
And most absurd is the use of the First Amendment by law schools to circumvent the Solomon Amendment, a federal law that requires schools receiving federal funding to give equal access to military representatives for recruiting purposes.
With an eye towards universal Islamic hegemony, many universities, embracing their non-discrimination policies, prohibited military representatives from recruiting on campus because of the military’s policy of not embracing homosexuality. In the post 9-11 world, the government thought it fair that taxpayer subsidized schools treat military recruiters in the same way that they treat all other employment recruiters (mushroom growers included). Many law schools objected and filed suit (FAIR v. Rumsfeld).
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals found that the Solomon Amendment violated the First Amendment by restricting the right of expressive association and by forcing the law schools to assist the military in disseminating its expressive message. Although the schools have the option of restricting military recruitment by refusing federal funding, the court found that Congress could not require the forfeiture of the right of free speech as a quid pro quo for receiving federal funds. If this had been about the Boy Scouts of America (with a belief in God), the court would have immediately revoked federal funding.
A very trusted legal scholar asked me this question with regard to Fair v. Rumsfeld, “If the law schools' resistance to military recruiters equals "expression" protected by the constitution, why can't our resistance to funding NPR and PBS also be considered "expression" worthy of constitutional protection? After all, we ideologically object to the expressive messages that NPR and PBS put out 24 hours a day.”
Public funding of the CPB et al is a violation of First Amendment rights for millions of people. By diverting tax dollars to the CPB, the government is placing a mandatory assessment upon taxpayers to fund the propagation of CPB’s expressive message which millions of taxpayers find objectionable. If CPB’s message is truly worthy of dissemination...CPB has the Constitutional right to disseminate that message without the forced support of the taxpayer.
A top rated show of my local PBS station is the broadcast of UCONN women’s basketball games, “UCONN women's basketball on Connecticut PTV consistently scores the highest ratings in all of public television”. Funny...I always thought that public service meant something other than government subsidized competition with ESPN.
RightPage