Because the First Amendment, that’s why

According to a Tweet by Arik Hesseldahl, the reader-supported online publication Mother Jones “won what may be the most important media law court case of the year.”

In an Oct. 30 article, the publication announced that it had won the suit but that the legal fees to the nonprofit damn near put them out of business and that they are doing a fundraiser to recoup the losses.

Would it surprise you to know I donated? And regardless of your political bend, you should too.

Here is why.

Because the First Amendment, that’s why.

While you should read the article and subsequent backstory to get the broader implication of its importance, the recap is this that a wealthy businessman who supported a political candidate did not like that a journalist wrote about it. He used his money and local political pull to strategically attempt to sue Mother Jones and keep the monetary amount of the suit low enough to prevent it from being heard in a federal court. Crafty, you have to give him that.

His end game was obvious. He intended to win his suit how most suits are won and that is by attrition. He knew the rag could not afford a long, drawn-out legal battle. He also knew that his prevailing would not likely result in anything more than that. I would assert that he knew he had not been defamed or injured and furthermore knew that a win would not produce any significant monetary gain for him. It was a vindictive move of the lowest form.

Fortunately, a judge saw right through him.

But he’s not done by a long shot. According to Mother Jones, “[Frank] VanderSloot issued a statement saying he is establishing and pledging $1 million to a legal fund for people seeking to sue Mother Jones and other members of the ‘liberal press.'”

Notice he does not say that he wants to sue a person or entity for wrongdoing. The wrongdoing in his mind appears to be disagreeing with his political bent.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

And as with most of what I opine about, there is a dangerous local correlation to what is happening elsewhere in our country.

In 2011, the self-professed all-wise and all-knowing State of Utah tried to pass legislation that had a similar agenda.

House Bill 477 was an attempt to abdicate, if not all-out interfere with, the people and the press’s ability to obtain information about what it was doing through the Government Rights and Access Management Act. They did not succeed, thanks to watchdog journalists who exposed their plans and sounded the alarm, but as recently as this year, they are at it again. Watch out for them, as they may try to slip a different version of the same bad laws into a bill.

And in a more microcosmic but equally significant portion of the state, a college had to have a federal lawsuit brought upon it before it would acquiesce to First Amendment standards as mandated by law at a public, federally-funded institution.

Dixie State University seems to have learned at least one lesson from that lawsuit, but there are still more suits pending involving a host of civil rights violations as well as the possibility of some state and federal laws that may have been violated at the criminal level.

There is much work yet to do there as they still seem to be slow in getting it.

And on a local news level, some of you may remember what we at the Indy affectionately call “Undiegate.”

An article published featured a photo that locals found distasteful according to their religious beliefs, and while we understood, we expected that they understood that they were equally protected by the First Amendment, not from it.

An all-out subversive campaign was waged to demand that advertisers not to do business with us. It was their attempt at attrition, and by default they were saying the same thing VanderSloot was saying, which was that if we printed something they disagreed with, they would run us out of business.

We, like Mother Jones, stood our ground, and not without some licks I will tell you. But the end result is this: Mother Jones is still here and so are we, and like us or hate us, you cannot say we cow tow to anyone. We go after the truth, and we maintain a journalistic rigor consistent with what our readers expect, whether they know it or not.

Listen, Utah: I get it. Guns and God and screw the fed, and don’t spread the gay and shit. You are not so complicated a culture that you are not easily understood by the most rudimentary of minds—baffling and amusing, but not misunderstood. And the rest of us in this country put up with you because we do not cherry-pick from the Constitution like you do.

You cannot be an advocate for the Second Amendment without being as staunch an advocate for the First. The one precedes the other for a reason that even you can understand. If you don’t have freedom of speech, if you don’t have an outside estate to keep the government in line, if you don’t have freedom to worship as you please, then you don’t need the guns because you don’t have anything to defend. When will you get that?

So while we are not holding a fundraiser here for the Indy, if you support a free press, you can be assured that you get it from us. Hell, even if you don’t support us, you’re still getting it.

See you out there.