Craven de Kere wrote:It's a pretty simple legal concept that I thought you would get without what feels like a patronizing explanation.
I dont care much about the "free speech" issue in this context ... I think thats a bit far-fetched, a bit too much of an attempt to ideoligize what is basically merely a question of tightarsism.
But I did wade into this discussion of what the free speech issue can all be said to encompass a while ago on this board, meeting someone who also argued that it was purely a legal concept and thus only ever can be applied to state/government action, and is irrelevant in any other context. I think it was about the question of whether, when a TV station's owner orders his stations to broadcast a certain programme and prohibits their reporters to report on it from anything but a specific, partisan slant, there is a question of free speech involved. No, said the defenders of the owner (I think it was in the context of that pre-election anti-Kerry broadcast), because the legal definition only ever covers state repression, and that is not the case here.
I find this odd. We do use (and defend) questions of free speech a little bit more widely than in the purely legal sense, in day-to-day language. For example: Theo van Gogh had his throat ritually slit by a Muslim extremist who was angry about what he had said about Muslims and about the film he had made (in which Quran texts were shown scribbled on naked female bodies - blasphemy, in the perpetrator's eyes). So he was murdered for the way he publicly expressed his opinion, and now other persons who express the same kind of opinion are threatened with such murder too. Isn't that a free speech issue? I mean, isn't free speech at stake, when people are proscribed the right to freely express their opinion this way (even if it is by other people, rather than by the state)? I would think so.
Anyway, that on an aside concerning the use of terminology.
