Scoop: Schumer pledges to pass antisemitism bill in Senate's lame-duck session

[Ford_Prefect]

12. That sounds very much like the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Are you saying they aren't enforceable?

Have we reached an era when legal thinking is so divided that everyone of any color, belief, or kind must have a specific legal definition in law in order to be covered? IMHO this proposed law is the kind of interference the founders most assuredly did not wish. I firmly believe there are more appropriate ways to deal with the problems it attempts to redress.

I admit that these days defining myself beyond me, myself, and I gets to be linguistically challenging. But that should be no reason for an extra law every time we have a new, or old, problem to solve. European hate speech laws arose from the ashes of WWII. They aren't perfect but they make a good starting point.

I was there and marched when the cause was to stop the insane war in Viet Nam, when Equal Rights and Women's Rights were in doubt, and when the cause was to end Apartheid. There were those at the time who felt threatened enough to demand federal laws to stop students and others from marching and protesting. Wiser minds prevailed at the time.

This is a different set of causes and actors drawing on a much different information stream and subject to much more disinformation than was the case back then. I do not advocate for those who wish violence against Israel or Jewish people anywhere. At the same time I feel that the IDF response to Oct.7 seems far out of proportion and deserves discussion by serious people. Both Hamas and Netanyahu have much to answer for. So, it seems, do those who back them.

American citizens deserve to have laws enforced which allow for reasonable expression and reasoned differences of opinion. They should also be safe from those who would rather do harm than personally speak in defense of their own ideas. They likewise should be kept safe from those who abuse the law to silence ideas they do not like. A formerly great American newspaper with a long history of illuminating such controversy bears the motto "Democracy Dies in Darkness". Any law which interferes with such illumination is headed in the wrong direction, however well intended.