It’s no secret that some serious and basic human rights are suspended, deferred, and outright denied for those caged at Guantánamo Bay, the United States’ military prison where it keeps its political prisoners. These violations also include the freedom to read. Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the charity...
This column has discussed book after book that has been banned and/or challenged for various reasons. Most incidents are the result of ignorance and intolerance, others may even be innocently well-intentioned; but what happens when entire libraries are threatened in order to serve the arrogant hatred of racism from...
I hope everyone had a fun Halloween. Well, with November comes another edition of my paranormal column, Across the Great Divide and this month I ask – “Who Left the Gate Open? The Idiots Got Out Again.” For all the many topics and issues within the realm of parapsychology...
I am livid and pissed off beyond words right now. A very old and mostly abandoned, but beautiful, cemetery in Bruce Township, Michigan, that I have visited many, many times has been completely destroyed by reckless, disrespectful, asinine, heartless fucktards. The criminals toppled over headstones and threw the famous...
The freedom of speech comes at a very high price for those few who dare to engage in their constitutional right to use it. For Justin Carter it cost him 5 months of his life- and could still cost him at least 10 more years. Now, a teenage coffee...
I know what some of you are thinking: “He’s finally lost his mind. Could Mr. Free Speech be condoning censorship?” You’d be jumping to an incorrect conclusion on both counts. Let me explain. We know that censorship comes in any form and across any medium. Neither is it isolated...
Growing up in the 1980s many of us had our interest in science inspired and popularized in the television show, MacGyver. Come on, who could forget such classic scenes like when he made a defibrillator out of some candlesticks, a microphone cord, and a rubber mat? Or how about...
Most people have either had the experience or been witness to the self-censorship that comes from the fear of causing offense to someone; some others may feel that over-protectiveness denies people the opportunity to decide for themselves where the moral line is when it comes to artful expression. Most...
“It’s a new age of book banning,” says ACLU lawyer, Tony Rothert. It’s well established that religion is often used as the justification behind many of the book challenges and outright bans occurring in schools and public libraries. It’s also been seen right here in this series that the...
Americans tend to arrogantly think that censorship is something that only happened in Stalinist Russia or, currently, the Middle East; America, of course, is proclaimed to be the land of the free. That stuff doesn’t happen here. Many other countries think that censorship only happens within the borders of...