Now waitaminute.
Freedom of the press belongs to those who own presses.
The first amendment protects you from *Government* censorship---it doesn't say every Tom, Dick and Harry (or Phil) with a press has to foot the bill to print *your* speeches, rants, essays, poetry, etc.
You have the right to say what you want--you don't have the right to demand that others pay for it.
None of us here has the *right* to post our opinions on Ginger's forum. *Ginger* graciously chooses to pay for an open forum to discuss the teen "help" industry because *she* believes such an open discussion is important enough to the welfare of teens that she is personally willing to fund that discussion and take the time to support it---even paying her time and money to provide a forum for people who disagree with her position.
She doesn't *have* to. She *chooses* to. And gets mega kudos in my book for doing it.
*I*, on the other hand, am an unpaid moderator (read: censor) on my publisher's webboard.
I, personally, censor things that break the rules of the guy paying the freight for that message board.
One of the reasons I'm willing to do that is because places like Usenet, that are truly open forums for discussions of anything by anyone, exist.
The people who frequent my publisher's webboard do so *because* there are censors like me who weed out flaming, trolling, and non-PG-13 content. And weed out the webboard accounts of habitual offenders.
Freedom of speech means that the government can't prosecute you for what you say, and that you can pay your money to say whatever you like, and that you can say whatever you like in public forums like the town square, or where people like Ginger choose to pay for a place for you to speak freely.
Freedom of speech doesn't give you any right to the jurisdiction over someone else's ears. If someone else doesn't want to hear what you (or I) have to say, they have the right to avoid us.
"Dr. Phil" has no obligation, moral or otherwise, to pay for a place for you, me, or anyone else to expound. If he pays for a podium, he has the right to decide who and what he's going to allow to speak from that podium.
I think his opinions are wrong and dangerous---but he has a right to have those opinions, and he has a right to express those opinions, and he has a right to choose not to fund the expression of contrary opinions on his own site---or, more to the point, his employers or whoever is paying for the site has a right to choose what expressions they fund and what they don't.
If they don't want to pay for the storage of yours, mine, or someone else's screeds on their servers, they certainly have the right to choose to delete those screeds from their own systems or from the space they rent on commercial systems.
Believe you me that if WWASPS or other RTC's posted advertisements on my publisher's website that, advertisements being a violation of the rules there, I would *certainly* delete those posts. And I would delete the user accounts that posted those ads from my publisher's message board system.
And if someone was advocating for RTCs in a way that I felt was harmful, I'd certainly try to persuade my boss that those posts *should* be against the rules and censored. I don't know if he'd agree with me or not, but since I'm not paying the freight, I just interpret and enforce the rules and arbitrate whether a particular post breaches his rules or whether a particular poster is a habitual offender---I don't *make* the rules, and enforce them as best I can according to what I think the boss would do if he was reading the post in question, rather than what *I* want.
There is a reasonable place in civilized society for censors in privately funded spaces. We protect the free association rights of people to decide for themselves what they do and don't want to listen to.
You have freedom over your mouth, but you have freedom over your ears, too. The next time you turn on a radio station and get to hear the style of music you tuned in for instead of a street preacher telling you you're going to hell, thank a censor.
Timoclea
(Disclaimer: Opinions expressed anywhere on Fornits are strictly my own and are *not* those of my publisher, who to my knowledge doesn't even read this board and is as much of an opinionated cuss as I am and almost *certainly* disagrees with me strongly on various issues, and agrees with me on others, and partially agrees and partially disagrees on many, and---you get the idea. Blame *me* for my opinions if blame you must.)
