Mental Beatdown

"I Can Say It! First Amendment Rights!"

This issue is so horribly misconstrued and out of hand, so allow me to fix this shit.

Let's say you meet an asshole. Utter, dickface asshole. They start harassing you, saying they're going to beat the shit out of you/kill you/torture you/kill your dog/burn your favorite pajama pants. Then they may go "You can't report me, I have First Amendment rights."

You tell that person to go take the nearest flagpole and shove it directly up their asshole. That's totally not how it works ever.

First Amendment rights are not like owning an Apple watch; they don't give you immediate power to be a dick to anyone and everyone around you. First Amendment rights, or free speech, means that if you held up a megaphone and yelled "I HATE OBAMA AND HIS POLICIES" really loud, the government cannot censor you. This doesn't mean you can say you want to hurt him or do anything like that. 

But even THAT has exceptions. If you start telling someone how you did solething highly illegal, free speech cannot protect you. If you wrote a story about torturing someone with no artistic value, free speech cannot protect you (I'm still puzzled on how Saw passed as "art" but whatever). So Lolita by Vlademir Nabakov isn't censored because it has strong artistic value, despite it basically being about pedophilia. But if you wrote a story or fanfiction about pedophilia that had no artistic value, you can be arrested. There are more complications with that depending on your country and state but that is the rough gist of it. 

So the next time a "#gate" comes around and you seen an asshole yelling about free speech rights and how they have the right to harass and mentally fuck up people, have solace in knowing they're wrong.