The KKK and Nazis by definition advocate genocide (UN definition). You might say some of the other groups with different names might not be so explicit. This is true. But this is a factual problem of an order that is not unusual for deciding the applicability of many criminal statutes. Lawyers are known for being into hair splitting/line drawing problems of this type. That's all people do in law school: hairsplitting problems. Only when a law that someone doesn't like occurs do people object: "oh, how will we draw the line ? we'll catch people we don't want to catch." Of course, there's no problem with overbroadness side effects when people get 40 years for having one marajuana cigarette, because the drug problem is worse than racism, of course (ha).
By the way, freedom of speech is not an absolute right. In the very first Supreme Court case on the freedom of speech, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' most famous words in his decision are an effort to carve out and exception to First Amendment protection: "Crying fire falsely in a crowded theatre." He gives this example to show that freedom of speech is not absolute. Then in the case itself he finds another exception to freedom of speech for "clear and present danger". The result is he upholds the conviction of a socialist opponent to WW I (Schenck, I think), who opposed it because it was a capitalist war against the interest of the workers who were doing the dying in it. In another case, Eugene Debs was imprisoned for the same anti-war advocacy. This is one reason I say the First Amendment has not in fact protected the Left when it counts. Other examples are the Palmer Raids, the Whitney case, the Smith Act convictions and all around McCarthyism. In other words, all of the time that it really counted, until the Communists especially had been effectively bludgeoned to organizational "death". Then freedom of speech was opened up IN A PHONY WAY for the propaganda line that the U.S. is the "free world". It is part of the bourgeois finesse: intermittent rather than continuous state represssion. Anyway, my point here is that there have always been exceptions to freedom of speech. Others are libel, slander,obscenity and announcing an airline hijacking.
Sure we have to build a much stronger working class/left movement before we actualize this proposal, but we can think through the issues now.
Charles Brown
>>> jf noonan <jfn1 at msc.com> 04/21/99 04:12PM >>>
On Wed, 21 Apr 1999, Charles Brown wrote:
>
> Outlaw the KKK and Nazis !
>
I'm curious, would you outlaw the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation as well?
--
Joseph Noonan jfn1 at msc.com
If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
-Emma Goldman