Interesting read from a libertarian professor about how the government is advancing censorship, and we are letting it happen, and even the ACLU is off track in its defense of free speech.

Creeping Censorship by Tibor R. Machan

[snip]

Next, once the idea of individual rights has been gradually eroded this way, it no longer needs to be a public sphere for it to come under government supervision. Thus we see the push for the ugly creeping censorship that now faces us.

Sadly, the one organization that is alert to it, the American Civil Liberties Union, is mounting a resistance with bad arguments – the ACLU is talking about how “indecency” cannot be defined, as if that were the main reason against the proposed policy. Yet even if “indecency” were perfectly definable – just as if “pornography” were – it would not authorize anyone at all to ban it. Free men and women must self-regulate these matters. Parents must deal with such hazards vis-à-vis their children, let alone themselves, not a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats who have no basic right to tell us what to watch, what to say, what to read or anything.

Let me tell you, this is really scary. And there isn’t even any allusion to terrorism here, so the folks pushing for this censorship are evidently very confident that they have worn us all down in our resistance to the creeping expansion of government power. I wish we could prove them wrong.