Been there, done that.

Does the name Lenny Bruce ring any bells. Free speech in America? Pleeease... Ever heard of the Federal Censorship Commission a.k.a. FCC? Are you unfamiliar with their... ongoing crusade.

Bruce was sentenced on December 21, 1964, to four months in the workhouse; he was set free on bail during the appeals process and died before the appeal was decided.

From his Wikipedia profile

Legal troubles

On October 4, 1961 Bruce was arrested for obscenity[3] at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco; he had used the word cocksucker and riffed that "'to' is a preposition, 'come' is a verb" and that the sexual context of "come" is so common that it bears no weight, and that if someone hearing it becomes upset, they "probably can't come." Although the jury acquitted him, other law enforcement agencies began monitoring his appearances, resulting in frequent arrests under charges of obscenity. The increased scrutiny also led to an arrest in Philadelphia for drug possession in the same year, and again in Los Angeles, California, two years later.

By the end of 1963, he had become a target of the Manhattan district attorney, Frank Hogan, who was working closely with Francis Cardinal Spellman, the Archbishop of New York. The association of Hogan and Spellman led to the often repeated speculation that Bruce's persecution was actually fueled by his status as the original comedic Catholic Church-basher. In April 1964, he appeared twice at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, with undercover police detectives in the audience. On both occasions, he was arrested after leaving the stage, the complaints again resting on his use of various obscenities.

A three-judge panel presided over his widely-publicized six-month trial, with Bruce and club owner Howard Solomon being found guilty of obscenity on November 4, 1964. The conviction was announced despite positive testimony and petitions of support from Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Jules Feiffer, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, William Styron, and James Baldwin, among other artists, writers and educators, as well as Manhattan journalist and television personality Dorothy Kilgallen and sociologist Herbert Gans. Bruce was sentenced on December 21, 1964, to four months in the workhouse; he was set free on bail during the appeals process and died before the appeal was decided. Solomon's conviction was eventually overturned by New York's highest court, the New York Court of Appeals, in 1970 (People v. Solomon, 26 N.Y.2d. 621).

North African and Middle Eastern immigrants (with their strong Islamic roots) are to Europe what Hispanics are to N. America -- cheap black-market labor. The [inhumane] inclination to exploit those of limited socio-economic status is universal.

BTW, we have hate speech laws here in America too.

Several European countries have such "hate speech" laws. Germany for one, obviously the Netherlands, and France as well. Bridget Bardot, the sex-pot actress from the 50s and 60s, is currently under indictment in her native France for "insulting" Muslims.

One genuine exception seems to be Denmark, where the government has come down firmly on the side of press freedom in its defense of the publication of the controversial cartoons of Mohammed that caused such an uproar a couple of years ago.

Unfortunately, our own country seems to be drifting in the direction of criminalization of thought if those thoughts offend someone.

Most sincerely,

T. J. Flapsaddle

A law by any other name...

Case in point - the tyrannical police-state dream legislation Patiot Act. It's anything but patriotic according to the terms and spirit exhibited throughout America's founding documents; the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the [Peoples] Bill of Rights.

I was mistaken in stating that we have hate speech laws in America. But we do have a close-knit cousin which may be even worse - hate crime legislation. I say damn the difference.

How can the state possibly prosecute one for 'errant' thinking, minus some evidence of the prohibited thought process having been communicated outwardly.

Can I be first?

TRY 'EM & FRY 'EM