Taunts are free speech, too

By Corey Friedman

There’s no right to freedom from offense. There’s no right to freedom from offense. There’s no right to freedom from offense. There’s no right to freedom from offense. There’s no r…

If that’s a smidgen repetitive for you, you’re probably not in government. Can’t say it enough times to penetrate the ponderous skulls of the well-meaning lunkheads we put in office.

A Missouri teen hanged herself last year after receiving insulting MySpace messages purportedly from a teen boy. Earlier messages from the profile, which had been created by a neighborhood woman and accessed by the girl’s classmates and at least one mother, suggested the fake boy had a crush on the teen.

The vicious puppeteers behind the phony profile lured her in with compliments and then sent demeaning and hurtful messages. Bulletins posted on MySpace called her “fat” and “a slut,” according to the St. Charles (Mo.) Journal, which first reported the story before the national news media caught on.

In response to this tragedy, Missouri lawmakers from the governor on down are harrumphing about Internet bullying — cyberstalking, I think, is the term that’s in vogue now — and passing all sorts of frightening new laws to compel civility, to make it a crime to hurt someone’s feelings.

While I offer the caveat that I haven’t read the MySpace messages sent to the teen and therefore can’t blindly defend the constitutionality of their content, I’d guess that there’s nothing that even remotely approaches the legal definition of harassment.

It’s fine to insulate children from insults on the school playground, but in the real world, you can’t make it a crime to criticize someone, no matter how cruel the verbal jabs may be. If and when they rise to the legal level of harassment, they’ll be dealt with, but that’s a threshold that — in the interest of protecting free speech — is necessarily high.

What happened to Megan Meier was appalling. The architects of the fake profile are gutless ghouls who served up some of the ickiest bile we humans can brew.

But you can’t lock them up or even fine them for name-calling. Not without using the Bill of Rights as something like toilet paper, anyway.

There’s no right to freedom from offense. There’s no right to freedom from offense. There’s no right to fr…

No use in saying it anymore, I guess. Nobody seems to be listening.