Say the words "First Amendment" to Americans today and most will immediately think "Free Speech." But the first amendment encompasses much more than merely allowing us to speak what we think.
First Amendment rights protect the entire process of thought and the creation and expression of ideas. When we think, our minds use reason to create ideas. We express those ideas in many different ways: When we talk; when we write; when we believe; when we assemble; when we petition the government. All these actions, and expressions, are protected by the first amendment.
I Write this in hopes to help explain to some people why America's founding fathers put freedom of thought and expression as the first right in the Bill of Rights. As the Presidential elections of 2012 draw closer, I see daily examples of attempts to stiffle freedom in the united states, mostly to average citizens who are just speaking there minds on issues that impact there daily lives.
We can look to Thomas Jefferson for an example. As a proponent of a free country and a free people, Jefferson realized that oppression of ideas had been a cause of persecution in Europe for centuries. In
the preamble for Virginia's law on religious freedom, Jefferson wrote what he considered to be the starting point. He was, “Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free..And, since the mind is free, so must thought - and the expression of thought - be free and protected.
In 1786, Jefferson explained why he believed protection of free expression was so important in American law:...Had the principles which dictated it, been always acted upon by civil governments, the demon of persecution would never have existed; sincere enquiries would never have been discouraged; truth and reason would have had fair play; and most of the evils which have disturbed the peace of the world, and obstructed human improvement, would have been prevented. Governments which continue to disallow free expression are still causing "most of the evils which have disturbed the peace of the world and obstructed human improvement."
Jefferson was right in 1786, and he is still right today. That's why freedom of expression is one of America's most cherished legal rights, and thats why I am compeled to write.
The subject of this is minor rant, for the most part will focus on the freedom of thought expressed in writing. Books (and their precursors) represent the best method people have to preserve and share their thoughts and ideas. As a result, the destruction of books represents some of the most flagrant abuses of free expression in recorded history.
If we examine how frequently books were destroyed - especially by burning - in the centuries before the American Republic, we can understand why protecting freedom of expression in any form, was a first precept in creating the legal foundations of American society.
Written thoughts on clay tablets, animal skins (scrolls) and papyrus were early forms of "books." For thousands of years before the printing press, scholars wrote and scribes copied "books" by hand. Sometimes it took a year or more to write, or copy, one manuscript. Often these works were
beautifully illuminated with stunning pictures and brightly colored letters.
In China, during the 9th century, a man named Wang Jie copied a book significant to his Buddhist religion. Translated from the Sanskrit, the title of Wang Jie's book is The Perfection of Wisdom which Cuts like a Thunderbolt. It is the earliest dated book in the world today and is commonly called the Diamond Sutra. It is at the British Library in London.
The book's inscription is interesting, it reads: Reverently caused to be made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 14th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong.
Translated into English, that's May 11, 868 AD.
The book was part of a library that was sealed in a walled-up cave in China in about 1000 AD. It was rediscovered in 1907 by Sir Marc Aurel Stein. We don't know why it was sealed in the cave, but protecting religious works from invading enemies had been the role of monks for centuries.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are another example of hidden texts, as are the “Missing” or Gnostic gospels of Mary Thomas, and Judas.
Today we can examine the work of one monk, Eadrith (later the Bishop of Lindisfarne), who produced a stunning example of book painting that is even older than the Diamond Sutra. Although the manuscript is undated, The Lindisfarne Gospels were likely copied and illustrated by Eadrith while he was still a monk at Lindisfarne Priory, on Holy Island (off the English Northumberland coast).
Since Eadrith became Bishop in 698 AD - the date scholars typically use for the manuscript - St. Bilfrid bound the manuscript and added precious gems and metalwork to its binding. Currently owned by the British Library, the Lindisfarne Gospels contain notes from a priest, Aldred, who also inserted a word-for-word Anglo-Saxon translation in the spaces between the lines of Latin text. Those insertions
were probably made between 950 and 970 AD.
In the meantime, the monks had fled looting Vikings who, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, invaded the area during January of 793. The monks took with them their most important treasures: the Cross of St. Cuthbert (which was made on Holy Island) and their "books" (the Lindisfarne Gospels).
The Gospels had no ordinary journey on that trip. While fleeing the Viking invaders, the monks - and their books - were shipwrecked in the Irish Sea. Later, the foot-high Lindisfarne Gospels washed ashore and were taken to Durham where monks continued to produce other precious manuscripts.
The Bodleian Library in Oxford owns impressive books and manuscripts from ancient times. Many were written or copied by religious scholars and scribes who, for centuries, dominated the intellectual world.
Because the Bible was the source of so much discussion and so many manuscripts produced
during the middle Ages, most of the copying was carried out by monks, who translated the works of other scholars. Sometimes monks fundamentally disagreed with the tenets of their religion, and this is reflected in there writings.
One way to control people is to keep them illiterate. If they can't read or write, people are less likely to disagree with civil and ecclesiastical laws that are imposed on them. Or, if people can read and write their own language ("the vernacular"), the best way to control the flow of ideas is to write all
scholarly, legal and theological works in a foreign language (like Latin, for example.)
In 500 AD there were about 400 vernacular translations of the Bible. Not long after, there was only one legal translation: the Latin Bible of the Catholic Church (the "Vulgate").
By the time John Wycliffe was a scholar at Oxford in 1360, the Vulgate was still the only legal Bible people could use. And, since common folks couldn't read Latin, and only priests could have a direct relationship with God, people had to accept what their priests told them. There was no method by which individuals could study the Bible and then disagree with the Church's interpretations. If monks and scholars couldn't disagree, how could the average man?
John Wycliffe was fed up with that state of affairs. Between 1360 and 1382 (or thereabouts), he and his Oxford associates translated the Bible into English. Wycliffe did not use Hebrew and Greek original sources. He used the Church's Latin version, and translated that.
At first English officials supported Wycliffe. They loved his beliefs that England should not have to pay huge amounts of money to the Catholic Church. But as Wycliffe became more radical in his thinking, the secular authorities distanced themselves even as the common man supported Wycliffe. He had given them something they never had before: A Bible in their own language.
As the Church's authority began to tighten around Wycliffe, he was expelled from Oxford in 1382. A series of strokes prevented further action against him at the time, and he died on December 31, 1384. The Church wasn't finished with John Wycliffe, though. His books were banned, but not before they were smuggled out of the country to Prague, among other places. There, they came into the hands of John Hus.
A scholar in Prague, John Hus, read Wycliffe's books. Hus copied them and became very vocal about his beliefs. He wrote his own books and told fellow parishioners the Church didn't have that much authority over their daily lives. Hus convinced people nothing in the Bible required them to buy Indulgences from the Church. When people stopped buying Indulgences, the Pope - who used indulgence proceeds to finance a military campaign against the King of Naples - was furious. He excommunicated Hus and put the entire city of Prague under an interdict, thereby forbidding
anyone from taking the sacraments.
Hus continued to speak his mind. He condemned the excessive lifestyles of the clergy, including the Pope. He told people not to listen to priests who didn't give Bible-based instruction. In response, the Church convened the Council of Constance to interrogate Hus, among other significant matters. Although Hus was guaranteed safe passage, the guarantee was a lie. Hus was arrested and tried by the Council. He was formally condemned and handed over to the secular authorities to be burned at the stake.
The Council also issued an Order to disinter the remains of John Wycliffe and burn them too. On July 6, 1415, as John Hus (whose name means "goose" in his native Czech) made his way to the place of execution, the authorities made him pass by a bonfire where his books were burning. Hus was unafraid and predicted the Protestant Reformation with almost uncanny accuracy. Some of his last words were:
You are going to burn a goose but in a century you will have a swan which you can neither roast nor boil.
He was off by only two years.
Hus' ashes were cast into the Rhine; Wycliffe's were dumped into the English River Swift in 1428. (One of Wycliffe's followers, Sir John Oldcastle, was first hanged and then literally roasted to
death in 1417.) But Hus' ideas lived on, and some of the people who adopted his thinking ultimately immigrated to America where they established the towns of Bethlehem and Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Other scholars continued his work in Europe. William Tyndale was one of those scholars.
Most folks today don't realize how significant William Tyndale still is to the English-speaking world. Taking the idea of Bible translation to its ultimate extreme, and not trusting the Church's Latin translation, Tyndale went to the Bible's primary sources. He and his colleagues translated Hebrew and Greek texts (prepared by the Dutch scholar Erasmus) into English. Tyndale, the scholar, had a special "feel" for the poetry of the English language. It is Tyndale's translated words that
brought us such memorable phrases as: Let there be light and Am I my brother's keeper? In fact, 85% of the King James Version of the Bible was taken directly from Tyndale's translation.
Although Tyndale's translated words are still with us today, his Bibles were burned in special ceremonies in London and Antwerp. Cardinal Wolsey, no doubt at Henry VIII's direction, wanted to
eliminate all English Bibles from the land. And, like Hus before him, Tyndale and his editor, John Rogers, were burned for translating the Bible into the "vernacular." At the time, people were even burned for reciting parts of the Bible in English.
As Tyndale and Rogers died in 1555, Tyndale's last words were for the King of England. He prayed for Henry VIII to see the light and allow his English translation to stand. One year after Tyndale's
death, Henry VIII allowed it. Today, only three copies of the Tyndale Bible (which had to be published outside England) are known to exist.
In 1994, the British Library paid more than 1 million pounds for its copy of Tyndale's New Testament
Martin Luther was a Catholic monk who thought the Church had gone too far when it required people to buy indulgences - a kind of financial transaction to absolve sins. Luther was especially upset with Johann Tetzel, a Dominican monk, who told folks they could get their deceased friends out of purgatory if they only dropped money into Tetzel's indulgence box.
Remorse and repentance for sins - not coins dropping into a money box - was Luther's interpretation of the Bible. He thought it was wrong for people to think they could "buy" their way to salvation. He believed the Pope wanted people to buy Indulgences to profit the Church (and build St. Peter's in Rome), not to save the souls of the buyers. He said so publicly in his list of "95 Theses."
Not content to merely write up the abuses, Luther tacked them to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany for all to see. The Diet (governing council) was convened in the city of Worms to judge Luther. At that "trial" Luther refused to recant and uttered his famous (probably apocryphal) words: "Here I stand; I can do no other." Those actions started the Protestant Reformation.
Saved from the stake by the help of the German ruler, Frederick the Wise, Luther had to hide from ecclesiastical authorities. Frederick put him up in the Castle of the Wartburg. During that time, using Tyndale's manuscripts, Luther translated the New Testament into German and ultimately translated the entire Bible. Luther's Bible was the first book published for mass circulation on the Gutenberg press in the nearby city of Mainz. But Luther's Bible, like so many vernacular translations before it, fell victim to the Pope's decrees and was burned in 1624.
Even though Luther's Bibles were ordered to be burned, the new invention - Gutenberg's printing press - made destruction of all Luther's translations very difficult. When books were no longer copied by hand, there were thousands more to destroy. Gutenberg's invention had changed everything.
Gutenberg's heavily illustrated Bible was both beautiful and expensive. It cost about three year's pay for an average clerk. As Michael Inman, the curator of rare books at New York Public Library puts it:
The mass printing of identical texts, which hadn't really been possible before Gutenberg, greatly facilitated the spread of knowledge. Over a period of several hundred years, language - spelling and grammar - was gradually codified. Literacy rates went up. More and more people were reading the same texts and discussing or debating the same ideas. This improvement in communication was one of the most important outcomes of printing.
The Gutenberg Bible was not burned because it was printed in Latin, not in the vernacular (everyday language of people).
Book burning was not unique to Europe during the middle Ages. As missionaries ventured to the "New
World," they exported theological correctness. Their zeal in converting others helped to destroy important aspects of ancient cultures - like the Mayans. As missionaries began to travel to the New World, the practice of ecclesiastical book censors and book burning went with them. Anxious to convert the Mayans, missionaries destroyed nearly all of their books. Only three or four Mayan
books remain in the world today. One of them, the Dresden Codex, is currently owned by the Staatsarchiv in Dresden, Germany. Other illuminated books helped the Conquerors understand the endemic culture of the Conquered.
The Codex Mendoza is a record of Mexican culture prepared for Emperor Charles V between 1535-50. Apparently it was acceptable for others to write about Mayan culture, even though books written by the people who lived in that civilization were destroyed. It's an excellent example how history gets distorted when secondary, slanted information is used instead of primary source material.
With the end of the middle Ages, uncontrolled book burning ceased, but attempts to thwart people from developing new ideas - and writing about them - continued. John Milton, the famous English
poet and author of Paradise Lost, gave an impassioned speech to the British Parliament in 1644, urging freedom of expression:
... Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.
Milton's words were themselves condemned by Parliament. So was the book that contained them: Areopagitica. At the time Milton made his plea to the British Parliament, colonists were already
arriving in America. The Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth Rock nearly twenty-five years before.
First Amendment freedoms certainly did not exist in America in those early days. Although colonists wanted freedom for themselves, their leaders had little tolerance for freedom of expression.
As long as ideas about religion and life meshed with the ideas of those who ruled, life was fine. If not, consequences were dire.
When the founding fathers signed the U.S. Constitution, their intent was to create laws that would allow a free people to live within a system of government they could themselves control. If we study the constitution, however, we can see why the framers also signed a Bill of Rights.
Despite its genius of government, the Constitution has gaps. Considering countless examples of ruthless government over centuries of abuse, the framers knew the people's rights needed to be specifically spelled out.
At least in America, systematic burning of books and flagrant censorship would be proscribed. One would have thought such activity would be proscribed everywhere in the modern world. Not
so.
Government-ordered book burning, like that of the Middle Ages, did resume in the 20th century.
A frightening event foreshadowed the Dark Age of the Modern World. On May 10, 1933 Nazis burned stacks of the greatest books ever written. Never were Heinrich Heine's words more accurate:
"Where ever they burn books they will also in the end, burn human beings"
Since writing was invented in about 3000 BC, people have expressed their thoughts in written form. The battle with censors has been ongoing. From the death of Socrates, in 399 BC (for teaching the youth of Athens to think for themselves) to the 1981 burning of the New Living Bible in Gastonia, North Carolina (because it is "a perverted commentary of the King James Version" of the Bible), history is filled with stories about secular and ecclesiastical authorities who tried to kill the product of free thought.
Some of the people who created those ideas were executed. But in America, the First Amendment guarantees cherished legal rights and protect both the process and the people. So the Question to
you, the reader….Is there censorship in America?.....Absolutely!
Print Censorship: Mark Twain's Huck Finn has been banned countless times since it was first published on February 18, 1885 In 2011, a publisher - following the advice of a Twain scholar - decided to change the author's words, making about 200 edits in the popular work. A raging debate immediately followed, with censorship accusations flying anew.
The Diary of Anne Frank, written by a young teenager who died of typhus while a prisoner at Bergen Belsen, was also recommended for rejection in 1983 because it is a "real downer."
Film Censorship: Aside from the usual justifications of pornography, language and violence, some movies are censored due to changing racial attitudes or political correctness in order to avoid ethnic stereotyping and/or ethnic offense despite its historical or artistic value. One example is the
still withdrawn "Censored Eleven" series of animated cartoons, which may have been innocent then, but are "incorrect" now.
Music Censorship: Music censorship has been implemented by states, religions, educational systems, families, retailers and lobbying groups (Remember Tipper Gore’s efforts in the 80’s)
Internet Censorship: Internet censorship may involve deceit. In such cases the censoring authority may block content while leading the public to believe that censorship has not been applied. This may be done by having the ISP provide a fake "Not Found" error message upon the request of an Internet page that is actually found but blocked.
Corporate Censorship: is the process by which editors in corporate media outlets intervene to disrupt the publishing of information that portrays their business or business partners in a negative light, or intervene to prevent alternate offers from reaching public exposure. This also includes Media Biased when reporting on news stories, mostly political in nature.
War Time Censorship: In 1991, during the U.S.-led UN invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon placed restrictions on media coverage of the ground war to protect confidential military information. Such issues arose again during the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, when many embedded reporters accompanied soldiers as they made their way into the country. These reports were subject to censorship in that they were not allowed to reveal a unit's exact location.
So, yes, America has censorship even today. We may not see it for what it is, but it is there none the less. It may be veiled under the guise of “National Security” as in the recent Wikileaks release, or under the threat of Intimidation, as in the Department of Homeland Security labeling returning War veterans as “Potential Threats” to national security in an effort to stifle free speech and discontent.
That my friends, is why first amendment protection of free thought and expression is as important today as it was when the Bill of Rights was first written. When someone speaks out, reguardless of if you agree with the statement, or not, we must respect the right of the person to say it.
