November 17, 2006
Putnam County Courthouse

Good morning,

I’d like to personally thank each and every one of you for coming out this morning to support our right as citizens to voice our opinions in our public speech and posted writings in matters concerning our government and its officials. Nothing is more patriotic or essential to liberty than citizens steadfastly watching guard over the affairs of state.

When our Constitution was first drafted Congress avoided bestowing rights to the people, believing those rights would flow naturally from state governments based on common sense and the common principals of societal living. Virginia was one such state, guaranteeing in their Declaration of Rights a degree of personal freedom in speech and religion but Thomas Jefferson felt the Constitution to be incomplete without such Federal safeguards. The first ten amendments to that document, those we know as the “Bill of Rights”, were not so easily forthcoming for the Congress resisted, but the people demanded such protections and in 1789, thirteen years after we declared our separation from England, Congress capitulated, seeing Jefferson’s wisdom and answered the call of the people.

Supreme Court Justice William Douglas had this to say about the First Amendment:

”The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread
practice of government suppression of embarrassing information.”

A bit of a joke, perhaps, but the Justice spoke a truth that brings us here today.

Yet there is a chill in the air this fine morning, and it is not the chill of a mid-November day, but the chill of jury verdicts in support of politicians against personal political opinions expressed in the public sphere. Where once the citizenry was free to criticize their government, with the slowly rising tide of lawsuits instituted by elected officials against the citizenry we may no longer be as free as we have come to believe and the basic tenets of our democracy are at risk.

Since the 2004 elections when attorneys for the President threatened a lawsuit against Zack Exley, a 29 year old computer programmer, who ran a parody website called georgebush.org, the tide began to turn against unfettered criticism of government and its officials. Not since the Federalists passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 has an elected official of this caliber threatened to quell personal political opinion. But as in
‘trickle down’ economics, we now have trickle-down political lawsuits designed specifically to quell active citizen participation in the affairs of the governed.

A case heard recently in this very building on behalf of a local elected official called a citizen’s opinion post to an online web log intentionally malicious. Many agree the lawsuit, like others before it, was specifically designed to stifle the free speech of citizens rightly - or wrongly - critiquing the methods and workings of their government and if so, this adds to this chill we feel in our collective bones.

Government, and those who serve in it, need to have tougher skins and they need to understand that they will sometimes be the targets of speech that will make them uncomfortable. In a 1964 suit against the New York Times (v. Sullivan, 376 US 254, 270) the court said:

“We have a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

Lori Potter, a Constitutional lawyer had this to say:

“In a representative democracy, public participation is the cornerstone of the system; it is a bedrock principle that connects government to the governed. It legitimizes the system and helps to make government accountable. On a day-to-day basis we rarely think about it in the exalted terms of its intellectual, legal or policy underpinnings, which go back to Aristotle and the Magna Carta, ... We simply take for granted what is both obvious and invisible: Public participation in government is a creed by which the nation lives. Public participation... ranges from the sublime to the messy, but it is authorized and encouraged by procedures and forms at every level of every branch of our government. That is why being sued for engaging in... activities not only strikes one as incongruous but indeed is antithetical to our form of constitutional democracy.”

When attorney Mike Godwin said, “The First Amendment was designed to protect offensive speech, because nobody ever tries to ban the other kind”, he had it right. But when government attempts - in even the smallest way - to ban or quell criticism of its actions it is the right and the duty of the people to stand up and say, without equivocation;

‘the ability to be freely and openly critical of our government must never be taken from us and
we will do what we must to ensure that right for ourselves and our future generations.’

I encourage each and every one of you to continue your duty as citizens of a free land and never allow our political leaders and government officials to see that we are afraid to take them to task; to publicly and vociferously ask the hard questions, to force them to comply with the will of the people and to publish – wherever and as often as necessary - our thoughts on these issues. Those of us on the front-lines of the battle for our freedoms cannot ever waver, cannot ever let our guard down and must remain united. The saying goes, the people united can never be defeated - we must work to make those words true today, true tomorrow and true into the future.

Thank you.
Jeff Green