Sex and outrage trump free speech, according to Birmingham politicians

By David McElroy · June 18, 2013

The test of free speech is whether you can say what you want to say when other people — including politicians — disagree with what you’re saying. When government bodies start voting to demand that you shut up, something has gone dreadfully wrong.

There’s apparently a matchmaking service called Arrangement Finders, but it’s a bit different from most online dating services. This outfit specializes in matching an “Established Man” with a “Perfect Princess,” in the words of the site. Is it dating or is it glorified prostitution? I can’t tell for sure, but it looks to me as though it’s really a legitimate service for men and women who are looking for others to fill a specific role.

An ABC News story says that men pay a monthly fee to the service and women join for free. It’s apparently been controversial in other cities, such as Chicago and Los Angeles. The site’s FAQs say your profile will be deleted if you advertise any kind of escort services.

I’d never heard of the service, but the company did something smart. It placed one billboard in Birmingham, about a mile from the airport, in a rundown part of town where billboards are probably cheap. And then outraged local people — and pandering politicians — gave them all the free publicity they could possibly want.

Last week, the Jefferson County Commission voted to ask the company to remove the billboard. Commission president David Carrington played the “it’s for the children” card when he told the Birmingham News why the billboard should come down.

“The billboard is inconsistent with the values that most people in Jefferson County hold and I think the one thing the residents of this state and this county are concerned with are our children,” Carrington said, “and I think anytime someone tries to hurt our children … we say, ‘not here.'”

It’s unclear which “children” Carrington is talking about, but that always plays well with outraged people, so it makes political sense — even though he and the other commissioners had to know their vote was meaningless.

If you really want to keep children from hearing about it, maybe you should shut up about it, rather than talking about it and talking about it, generating a series of newspaper and television news stories. The people who own the service had to have been delighted with all the free advertising that came with just placing one billboard in a cheap part of town where few people would have seen it.

Now the Birmingham City Council is getting in on the action. Councilman Jay Roberson is sponsoring a resolution that will be voted on today asking the company to remove the billboard.

“There is First Amendment freedom, but this stands in a negative manner,” Roberson told the Birmingham News. “We’re just not going to accept this type of advertisement in the city of Birmingham.”

If you can figure out what the first part of that quote means, you let me know, because the words don’t make much sense in English. What he seems to mean, though, is something like this: “I know people have the right to free speech, but that shouldn’t apply when we don’t like what they say.”

Government bodies have no business paying official attention to billboards, much less asking companies to remove them. Legally and morally, people have the right to speak freely. Pragmatically, talking about it just helps the company. I would have never heard of this service if it weren’t for the drumbeat of local news stories about how evil it is. How much do you want to bet that the company is laughing all the way to the bank?

Neither the City Council nor the County Commission will force the billboard to come down, but it shows you how little these politicians — and the angry people who prompted the political action — think of free speech.

Tolerance of free speech is easy when we approve of the things people say. The test of whether we really believe in free speech is whether we’re willing to ignore it when people say things we don’t approve of. By that test, there are a lot of people around here — including politicians — who don’t really believe in freedom of speech.

Update: The Birmingham City Council unanimously passed a resolution today calling for the billboard to come down. Roberson’s attitude is summed up in this comment to the Birmingham News: “We’re not going to tolerate derogatory advertising in the city of Birmingham.” The resolution has no teeth, but it’s very clear that these politicians don’t want to tolerate speech they disapprove of.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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