…or else it’s just a pretense, a lie.

Reporter James Kirchik, known from TNR and The Advocate, was cut off last week on Russia’s RT network for denouncing Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay law. I’m with Kirchik in opposing the law, which puts speech restrictions on Russian gays.

Don’t get me wrong: As RT were ‘paying for his mic’, they had every right to cut off Kirchik. They have no obligation to provide him with a platform. Still, Kirchik deserves our cheers and thanks for publicly thumbing his nose at a State-funded propaganda network and for defending free speech.

Actions to support free speech, yay! But free speech isn’t free speech, unless disagreeable/bad views may also be expressed. The principle is that anyone advocating bad politics is to be answered by more speech; never to be silenced by law.

And that brings us to the case of the Rev. Scott Lively. In a blog thread last week, rusty brought up Lively, who is being sued in Massachusetts at the behest of a Uganda gay group, for his advocacy of the criminalizing of homosexuality in Uganda.

Criminalizing homosexuality is anti-gay (a term that the Gay Left otherwise uses too much) and a violation of individuals’ natural rights. As such, it’s wrong. But natural rights include free speech and conscience. For someone to merely advocate that homosexuality be criminalized is not a violation of human rights; it is an exercise of them.

See the problem? The pro-gay side is out there using the law to restrict opponents’ political speech, in the name of human rights (which ought to include free speech). So wrong!

Sure, Rev. Lively advocates something dumb and bad. But he has the moral right to do it, which means he ought to have the legal right.

That a U.S.-based court presumes to deal with a Ugandan matter seems odd; but that it does so in order to punish anyone’s political advocacy is a disgrace, a sign of how dangerously low our once-great country has fallen.

SMUG (the Ugandan gay group) is wrong to try to silence Lively with a court case. Given that they are, the MA court should have refused to play along, on the grounds that the MA and U.S. Constitutions guarantee Lively his right to free speech in all political issues, even gay issues, even when international law fails to guarantee it and even, or especially, if Lively’s views are objectionable.

It’s the objectionable views – the ones that the government’s Court itself dislikes – that courts are most obligated to protect. By now, we are used to the Gay Left forgetting such basic principles of freedom and justice, but – “et tu, Massachusetts?”

UPDATE: It just occurred to me that the MA court, and others who blame the Rev. Lively for what Ugandan legislators do, might be infected with a racist premise: the premise that the Ugandans are mere children (intellectually and morally), influenced too easily by the white man (Lively), who is thus accountable for their actions. If true, it would support my earlier post on the racism of the Left in 2013.

NB: I had originally said that Lively was being “prosecuted” in MA, when of course I should have said “sued”. Mistake fixed.