However, the article ignores the far more persuasive argument against such laws, which asks on what basis the government justifies its involvement in private texting conversations, regardless of content. Though family values groups cry pornography, the logical inclusion of ‘sexting’ within its bounds is not obvious. Child pornography is a criminal act that requires an innocent victim. Voluntarily sent messages ought not to amount to criminal conduct, and criminal conviction based on communication that should never reach the eyes of the government ought to raise 4th Amendment concerns.

That family values groups are the driving force behind the effort is bothersome. As a family values traditionalist myself, I recognize the concern over the problem of ‘sexting’ and its consequences. But I also recognize that a core tenet of the conservative belief in these values is that the family is the basic unit of society. It follows that the government should refrain from interfering with the role of the family in handling its own problems. When a teenager ‘sexts’ her boyfriend, it is no one’s concern but her parents.

Family values conservatives such as Bill Brooks of the N.C. Family Policy Council, referenced in the DTH editorial, stubbornly insist on such a role for government, and they cease to talk merely about family values. They reveal their attempt to assert their moral agenda on society, and they trample on the privacy and the values of the family.

The arguments presented in defense of campaign finance regulation claim that large companies would be too influential in protecting their own interests if allowed to spend from their own treasuries on advertisements. Often this interest is the preservation of America’s free enterprise system, as it is with the opposition of the health insurance industry to the current reform proposals and that of American banks to further financial regulation. Attempts at silencing these businesses because of their participant role in the economic system under attack by Democrats are thus a subtle and indirect content-based restriction on free expression. While Democrats persisted in trying to prevent companies from mounting their opposition, those who are thinking more clearly value their perspective – if anything, the vehement admonitions of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries ought to awaken us to the detriment of current proposals.

With this ruling, businesses will be free to express themselves on these issues, just like regular Americans; under a now over-turned previous court decision the government could bar companies from spending money on campaign ads. Parts of the McCain-Feingold bill were voided which banned issue ads late in the campaign cycle. The issue at hand was the challenge to a video criticizing Hillary Clinton produced by a conservative advocacy group.

As I argued in a previous post, throughout the constitutional history of free expression, the rights of speech and press have been extended to financial capability. Some of the earliest attempts at censorship in America were licensing laws or taxes designed to hurt publishers financially and thus stop the presses. Such efforts are now unconstitutional; it is only logical that total disqualification from expression based on financial capability is now unconstitutional, as well.

The tax is part of the health reform bill passed by the Senate and a key difference between the Senate and House bills. Poorly designed to begin with, the tax would impact 19 percent of Americans with employer based health insurance, and that number would increase due to inflation as the threshold fails to keep up. Prior to the deal, 40 percent of those affected by the tax were to be union members, the primary reason why the tax was not a part of health reform in the more union-sensitive House.

The incident highlights several important points characteristic of the Democratic majority in Congress. First, they are uncomfortable taxing their own supporters, but relying almost exclusively on the wealthiest Americans, a majority of whom did not cast their votes for them, is a perfectly reasonable solution. It is this contradiction – that Democrats spend freely with their opponents’ money – that gives philosophical credence to the notion of wealth redistribution as nothing short of theft. If Democrats genuinely believed in compassion expressed through the paying of taxes (a preposterously nonsensical idea even on the surface), they would begin with those who voted yes for this sort of change. Instead, though the tax is already highly progressive by nature, and thus destined not to include much of the tax-paying Democratic constituency, they exempted even more of those citizens most likely to support the reform.

The related second point is that Democrats are increasingly comfortable with transparently corrupt deals aimed at appeasing key cogs in their machine. Unions are among the most dedicated supporters of the Democratic Party; they are also among the chief culprits of the inefficiency of employer based insurance and a driving force behind current health care reform. When their leaders realized that the Senate bill included many union members in the fund raising plan to finance their much sought reform, they worked a special interest deal to ensure that reform passed without forcing them to fund it.

The bill needed only to raise the premium threshold to be transparently aimed at exempting a key group of Democratic supporters; they made it even easier: they limited the exemption strictly to those supporters. Working families without union membership and the same priced employer based insurance would still pay the tax.

Having exempted their supporters from among the victims of the tax, it isn’t a stretch to call this a tax levied by Democrats on their political opposition. Conceptually that resembles theft far more than it does traditional revenue gathering. Attempting to limit an undesirable aspect of an unpopular bill to only political opposition might have even surprised James Madison, the prophet of encroaching majorities.

It does, however, bring to mind a certain tyrannical government lowering unpopular taxes in the quasi-democratically represented homeland, then attempting to fund their war with taxes on their unrepresented, yet industrious colonies.

Her argument establishes a new low for utter stupidity, arrogance, and selfish special-interest politics. She logically equates choice with forcing others to pay for an action of which society has yet to determine its morality. Stupid. She essentially accuses her opponents of distrusting those of different races and sexualities. Arrogant. And she claims that women she be allowed the freedom to be sexual at the expense of others. Selfish.

There is no better way to proceed than to list the most ridiculous of her reasons and address them.

“Because I support a woman’s right to choose.”

Then choose. But choosing involves initiating the action yourself; you are abdicating your choice in asking other’s to pay for it.

“Because a woman shouldn’t be denied a legal health procedure because she can’t pay for it.”

I’m going to assume you don’t actually believe this. Are we to pay for any and all legal health procedures? This sort of positive rights invention is objectively untenable; society cannot possibly pay for all legal health procedures (plastic surgery?). There is inevitable picking and choosing (rationing), the sort of moral decisions which you claim ought to remain to the private individual.

“Because pregnancy should not be a threat or a punishment for being sexual.”

Blame that one on the heartless conservatives if you wish, but that’s just biology. Humans bear the consequences of their actions. It’s part of choice.

“Because the seriousness of choosing to have a child or not cannot be decided by splitting hairs on the floor of Congress.”

Splitting hairs?!? Really?? It irks me that social liberals so often assume that their moral beliefs are self evident and thus can be imposed on everyone. You are asking others to pay for your questionable behavior. Congress has a right to “split hairs.”

“Because I want a doctor who can concentrate on my needs, rather than regulations or a pay plan.”

Wow. At least my fellow Review writers will appreciate the laughable irony.

“Because I value women’s potential and their futures — in careers, in families — and want them to have every opportunity to reach them in their own way, on their own time, and on their own terms.”

To conclude we return to this theme of choice.

The manner in which Jessica describes this freedom invokes the sacred notion that humans possess a natural right to exercise their own rationality to make their own decisions, and decisions of such serious import should be left to the private individual.

She contradicts herself blatantly in demanding that this decision necessarily involve others through public funding. An abortion is most certainly not “in her own way” and “on her own terms” if a woman coerces others into paying for it. To suggest that women deserve by right to have others fund their abortion contradicts the inherent nature of the freedom you describe. A woman who has an abortion on her own terms should not forcibly involve others.

A pro-choice advocate on these grounds should recognize the point that follows logically from her argument: that individuals must of their own accord decide whether to support such a complicated moral decision.

The Free Flow of Information Act would make federal law standards that already exist in the state court proceedings of 49 states and Washington, D.C. The bill would require that judges apply a balancing test weighing the public interest in a free press and investigatory journalism against the compelling interest in disclosing the source.

In order for the test to apply, however, the government, or the private party seeking disclosure in a civil case, would have to first demonstrate that it was “essential” to the case and that all other alternatives had been exhausted. In civil proceedings, the party seeking disclosure bears this burden, while in criminal proceedings the journalist must defend against it.

Importantly, this test would apply to leaks of classified information unless it involved a potential terrorist attack or “significant and articulable harm to national security.” The government must make a strong case in proving this point; absent specific details a case would not be exempted.

After a recent compromise between Senate sponsors and the White House, the bill appears set to pass. The route that it took to get there, however, reveals yet another potential concern for President Obama’s distrust of freedom. Most journalism advocates are accepting the bill as a step in the right direction, but not the level of protection that they desired.

“As one of the largest journalism organizations in the country, and with the most potentially affected by federal shield law protection, we are not where we had hoped to be with this legislation,” said Society of Professional Journalists President Kevin Smith in a press release. “However… SPJ is supporting this latest compromise and hopes for its quick passage.”

They were forced into this compromise because of Obama’s initial retraction of support and insistence that many more cases be exempt from the balancing test. The bill submitted by the White House was described as “worthless” by the SPJ, yet Senate Democrats unwaveringly held ground and managed to preserve much of its teeth in their compromise.

Obama’s legal attack on the press is interesting in light of his recent run-ins with Fox News. Assessments of the news organization’s credibility aside, Obama’s belittling of the Fox can accurately be described as retribution aimed at threatening further criticism.

Both his opposition to protecting essential journalistic freedoms and attempts at “chilling” the speech of his critics show a mystifying distrust in the long held merits of free speech, and they place him frighteningly at odds with the theoretical basis of Constitutional case law.

Avoidance of these “chilling effects” has been a justification for many restrictions on journalists to be declared unconstitutional, even in defending less tolerable forms of journalism such as libel. United States political philosophy places more trust on free individuals than on government. This often translates into sacrificing pragmatic advantages such as knowledge of confidential sources because the government involvement required would present the potential for a much more dangerous effect on the free press.

That Obama thinks himself to be outside this system of ideals shows that he just doesn’t get it.

Both reflect poorly on the state of American political values.

In response to Senator Snowe’s comment that she was “disappointed” that he had abandoned her hope for compromise and consensus, Reid expressed his disappointment that one issue was preventing the moderate Republican from becoming the only Senator of her party to join the majority on healthcare.

In his partisan rhetoric Reid was willing to forget that the public option is the single issue that has dominated healthcare debate for the last year and a half, and it is the component of the health care reform that starkly departs from American political and constitutional standards. He also expressed his remorse that the Republican Party can only now count two of its Senate caucus as “moderates,” an apparent indication that the party has devolved into partisan hacks unwilling to compromise.

Let us be thankful for them. It is our political values that have devolved when American politicians are stripped of their moderation for opposing Socialist reforms to the world’s greatest Capitalist nation. It is crucial to note that several of Reid’s moderate Democrats are themselves skeptical of the public option.

Every politician knows that compromise is never noble if it comes at the expense of what one thinks to be right; that is intuitively true. When it obstructs a majority from accomplishing what they arrogantly believe to be self-evidently good, they simply refuse to admit this.

Harry Reid provided us today with an epitome of why the argument of compromise is illegitimate, especially on an issue as important as healthcare, and a solution as radical as the public option. The extent to which it departs from America’s own history necessitates that Reid find for himself 60 supporters of the measure, and not go whining when others wish a less extreme course. If he does, at least he worked within the American democratic system (though I would still contend unconstitutionality). If he doesn’t, then perhaps he will realize his own hubris.

Yash Shah’s letter concerning the allocation of funds to the Carolina Review demonstrates nothing but his complete ignorance of the manner in which Student Congress allocates student fee funds. The $3,616.15 given to the Review on Tuesday was done so as a part of the precedent followed to ensure all student publications receive adequate and equal funding, and it comes from revenue generated for the express purpose of enhancing the Carolina community, a part of which is the marketplace of ideas in which the Review participates. To demand an explanation of this is to grossly exaggerate the complexity of it; all magazines that apply for funds to Student Congress and that demonstrate their value as a student organization receive half of the issues they print in a year plus one. Like every other student group, they are subjected to an application and questioning, presumably to supply the precise “explanation” that you so boldly presume was not given.

The Carolina Review is the longest tenured magazine at UNC, having existed since 1993, and we are one of a few groups who work hard to promote an intellectual perspective that would otherwise be ignored. He committed a serious logical mistake in singling out the Review when we are subjected to equal scrutiny and receive equal funding to all other publications, revealing his implicit assumption that conservatism is itself illegitimate. Conservatism, after all, is the only thing that separates us from Blue & White, Bounce, and other magazines that I doubt he finds of insufficient value. He claims not to be curbing free speech, but he is essentially advocating for the suppression of a particular viewpoint! I stand by my claims regarding the BSM; comparing my criticism of them to his of us, mine was based on a debatable point, one which he could have chosen himself to argue. Instead he levied a baseless and ignorant attack.

There are many who will be inclined to judge my comments on the letter as a biased attempt at saving face for the Review, an indignant cry of oppression thought to be so typical of UNC conservatives. Allow me to elaborate. Yash Shah has every right to be heard. And in a balanced marketplace of ideas, I firmly believe that truth and objectivity win out over naive and indefensible accusations. The Daily Tar Heel, however, is not a government – it cannot violate free press – and it has a monopoly on dialogue at UNC, which carries no legal obligation in a free country, but it ought to carry an ethical one. Just as conservative media ought not to grant a microphone to those on our side who display blatant disregard for facts and proper debate, there is no inherent reason why the DTH has to or should publish a letter they receive which explicitly misrepresents the circumstances of its topic. The result of such a letter is not a victory for free expression, but rather an intentional dissemination of misrepresented accusations, from which ensues a campus dialogue based on those misrepresented facts. That is truly harmful of the principle of free expression, which seeks to discover truth. If Yash Shah wants people to hear his voice, he can publish his work himself; the DTH’s refusal to ought to have been a natural function of this truth discovery process.

The DTH forum exists to promote useful dialogue on campus; the last two editions lead me to seriously doubt how concerned they are with actually fulfilling this purpose. They printed a misinformed and baseless letter, and then chose to dominate the forum the next day with responses to a comically trivial and absurd column from Friday at the expense of publishing my chance at response. It is a dangerous problem that our campus has only the DTH has its source of knowledge and understanding of campus. If only we were liberated from the shackles of this domineering disaster of a newspaper to know true free expression.

Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear a case examining the First Amendment questions perpetually raised regarding the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. It is peculiarly intriguing for its involvement of a campaign movie critical of Hillary Clinton, but the primary point of contest is the familiar one of the ongoing debate over the bill, whether campaign expenditures fit into the constitutionally protected category of free speech.

While Supreme Court case law has permanently fixed this as the necessary question to resolve, any passionate proponent of the libertarian ideal ought to wonder why we have limited ourselves through our own Constitution. Opponents of the bill, myself included, offer compelling arguments that campaign expenditures function in the process in the same manner as speech, and are in essence an expression of thought; the history of the First Amendment does in fact hold that government attempts at limiting the means by which expression is made violates that right.

Though modern Americans conceive of the right to free expression as a protection against censorship, particularly in the form of efforts to silence specific perspectives or opinions that are offensive to or critical of the authorities, in its origin and today the legal right is broader. With respect to press, where historically financing has always been necessary, freedom consisted of the institution existing independent of government reach; the absence of intentional censorship or the presence of content neutrality were not excuses. The First Amendment right to a free press was most clearly aimed at prohibiting prior restraint, which often involved censorship in the American colonies, but in its purest state took the form of print licenses or taxes on printing or advertising. In 1936 these methods were confirmed as unconstitutional.

Explicitly, one would be hard pressed to argue that limits on campaign contributions can be categorized as prior restraint, but the goal of the two is the same. Both serve to use government to control the flow of information in the political sphere, and both are deceptively benign because of their viewpoint neutrality. Attempts to limit the revenue of media of expression breaches a barrier erected between government and the press, and campaign finance certainly can be labeled as such.

Ultimately, however, only the perversion of our thinking that ignores the Ninth Amendment makes this effort at persuasion necessary. Campaign finance reform is unconstitutional because our system forbids the dangerous assumption of power that is a government controlling a private entity’s use of their property. A similar misapplication of the Bill of Rights occurs with respect to the right to privacy, which is said to live implicitly within several other important Amendments.

Some of the Founding Fathers who were skeptical of a Bill of Rights were so because they thought it might be misconstrued as an all inclusive statement of those rights possessed by citizens; the realization of this fear is confirmed in both the campaign finance debate and the privacy debate. The right to spend one’s money freely and the general right to privacy are protected in the American constitutional system because they are natural negative rights, and the protection of those rights is central to the individualism our government was founded to foster. This principle underlies our Constitution, and the Bill of Rights serves that principle, and not itself, as the end of our government. In a time when the invention of rights is popular, the rediscovery of this mode of thinking would serve our discourse well.

Apparently the leaders of Project Dinah have not learned a necessary lesson from their time on a university campus. Attempts at suppressing potentially offensive viewpoints only grant them more legitimacy than they deserve, and more importantly they demonstrate a tolerance for such suppression that reflects poorly on their attitude toward a marketplace of ideas. Their own arrogance prevents Project Dinah from realizing that the standard of offensiveness is relative, and that much of what their own organization promotes is offensive to many people. The Carolina Review, among others, has made this claim, but we have never called for their removal from campus, recognizing the inherent hypocrisy and violation of principle that would involve.

It is granted that Max’s movie promotes a detestable lack of moral conscious and respect for women, and even that it offers nothing to intellectual discourse of campus. Nonetheless there is value in a political culture that allows all views without exception to be expressed, and without exception means just that. Relative standards cannot be used to suppress expression or the principle is devoid of meaning. I hope that Project Dinah and others on this campus enamored with the culture of protest soon realize that their oppositional efforts to such unimportant figures as Max offer nothing to our discourse either, and they certainly do nothing substantial to aide in their cause. It just wastes all of our time, and hints at your own intolerance.

Generally I prefer to avoid using the word “offensive” for the reason that it is relative, and I firmly believe that it is one’s choice whether or not be offended; it also seems obvious to me that claiming offense offers nothing of value to a debate or cause, which is why groups such as Project Dinah frustrate dialogue on campus. I prefer words such as dispicable and deprave in reference to people like Tucker Max. Those words actually carry intellectual meaning. The words “irreverent” and “shallow” are words that also carry meaning, and words that I have used to describe the portrayal of sexuality by Project Dinah. I have refrained from using the word offensive, and personally, I find it arrogant and appalling that the group would have the gall to use the word in reference to someone else.

The April issue of the Carolina Review is printed and out on campus! They can be picked up at the UL, Davis, by the Union, and several academic buildings.

The pdf can be viewed here.

We would first like to thank the venerable Mr. Crowder for his excellent cover painting; our addition of color finally allows us to make full use of his talents. Though if you enjoyed his characterization of Mr. Obama from the fall, it can be viewed repeatedly, along with our other issues, in our archives.

We also must thank King Rand for his contributions to North Carolina state government. After all, “Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.” And if liberty didn’t have an enemy, things at the Carolina Review might just get too boring.