Welcome

This blog is a direct rebuttal to the newly formed coalition, So We Might See. From their website: "So We Might See" is an ecumenical, interfaith coalition that educates and advocates for media justice, both within and beyond communities of faith."

Some of their main goals are as follows:

• Connect the dots between media justice and other social justice issues "so that we might see" and imagine a better world.
• Conduct internet-driven, media justice campaigns that reach out to faith communities and their members.
• Use new technology to create and carry out grassroots advocacy and engage in political education.

They ask, in reference to new media, "Who is being left out, left behind and disenfranchised?"

Media justice? Yes, this is a new term to us here at "So We Might Speak" as well.

The "So We Might See" group has put together a new campaign, to wage war against "hate speech" in the media, where the end result is persecuting conservative talk radio and blogs that criticize people and ideas in supposedly politically incorrect manners.

They are trying to encourage people to fast to promote the suppression of free speech, that they deem as hateful. Their first focus? Anti-immigrant rhetoric, regardless of whether or not it is legitimate debate and criticism of policies. From their campaign website:

This year’s focus for meditation and social action is anti-immigrant hate speech, which employs flawed arguments to appeal to fears rather than facts. We hope you will sign up to participate in the 2009 Media Violence Fast, and join us as we take action to end this destructive form of violence.

More important and suspicious is their effort to petition the FCC to conduct an inquiry into hate speech. Might this be the same FCC that now has a "Diversity Czar" who believes in the "Fairness Doctrine?"

Please sign our petition to the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Commerce to ask them to conduct an inquiry into hate speech so that we can better understand it, and to update a government report that collects statistics and information about the connection between hate speech and hate crimes.

In order to take action, we are encouraging you to listen to some speech that you would not typically want to hear. But unless we do not expose ourselves to the vitriolic speech that appears in the public domain, it will be hard for us to marshal our moral outrage and our action.

We here at "So We Might Speak" believe in the First Amendment as it was written. We must protect all speech, no matter how offensive, for someday it may be YOUR speech that is considered offensive. We do not believe in the idea of "hate speech," nor do we believe that any one entity, agency, or person can be so omniscient as to discern whether someone else's words are "hateful." Who decides? To whom are you willing to give this power?

Of course there is speech that is offensive, and individuals have the right to associate or disassociate with those that offend them. However, to give government the power to lay out punishments for people who offend others is preposterous. No one has the right to not be offended. Many of us here at SWMS are offended on a daily basis, but none of us would advocate there be legal restrictions on, or punishments for the offensive speech.

This coalition is made up of people from all political ideologies and religious faiths, including those that are Agnostic or Athiest. We are people that believe in freedom and individual liberty.

George Orwell wrote a story once, about a society in which certain words and thoughts were not allowed. In his story a new language was created so that these prohibited words and thoughts could not even be formed as there were no words with which to form them. That is a nightmare world, and one that we will fight against.

Join us.