Two neighboring censorship efforts   Recently updated !


Concord is a small city which is the capital of New Hampshire. Bow is a small town just south of Concord. Governmental censorship efforts in both of them have made the news. The pushes to censor come from significantly different gangs, but they aren’t very different at the root.

I’ve written previously about the attempt by Bow, NH school officials to suppress peaceful protest. There isn’t much updated news on what’s happening there; court procedures like this move slowly. The essentials remain clear: the Bow officials claim that because someone might riot over those armbands, they constitute “harassment” and thus can legitimately be banned. This argument can be used to ban anything.

In Concord, NH, a holiday display by the Satanic Temple, put up on public ground with a permit, was twice vandalized, probably by religious thugs. Concord mayor Byron Champlin wants to ban it next year. He has said that “I believe the request was made not in the interest of promoting religious equity but in order to drive an anti-religious agenda.”

The two groups of would-be censors probably don’t agree on much. The Bow group would be called “left-wing,” Champlin and his cronies seem to belong to the “religious right.” They probably hate each other’s efforts, but their aims are basically the same: to suppress public expression of ideas which they oppose. The Bow officials equate wearing an armband with “harassment,” yet I have the feeling they’d support far more assertive forms of protest, such as chanting and carrying signs — when the protest is for something they like.

Champlin doesn’t want any opposition to religion, even though religious and anti-religious speech are equally protected by the First Amendment. The Satanic Temple is a non-theistic religious organization — they don’t actually believe in Satan — so Champlin’s position really means that he wants to suppress non-theistic religious views. Or perhaps non-Christian ones. Both groups want to use governmental power to silence ideas which they disagree with.

The Bow crowd is raising the specter of an imaginary threat, while the Concord one is hitching a ride on real vandalism. It’s hard to say which is worse. Purely hypothetical threats are a wild card that can be used to suppress anything. Taking advantage of vandalism gives it legitimacy. Both deserve contempt.

A display by the Freedom from Religion Foundation was put up in Concord as a counterbalance to religious displays, yet I haven’t heard of anyone trying to take it down. Probably people like Champlin know that the FFRF has money and lawyers and would handily beat them in court.

It will take work, but hopefully they’ll both be beaten. The First Amendment doesn’t say “freedom of speech which we agree with.”

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