is available here. I don’t have the time to blog about it much right now, except to say that many of the ACLU criticisms of it are quite apt. Gov. Dan Carcieri, whose office proposed the bill, deserves to be harshly criticized for this.
UPDATE: The Governor has withdrawn the bill; thanks to How Appealing for the pointer. Note also that this morning’s Providence Journal article on the bill was quite flawed; among other things, it claimed that
Carcieri has proposed, among several other steps, making it illegal in Rhode Island to “speak, utter, or print” statements in support of anarchy or government overthrow.
His proposal would make it unlawful for any person “to teach or advocate” a government overthrow, or display “any flag or emblem other than the flag of the United States” as preferable to the United States government.
In fact, the bill wouldn’t have made that speech illegal, but would have simply added other provisions to existing Rhode Island laws that already purport to make the speech illegal. It’s still a lousy bill — among other things, it would have added new speech restrictions, and one could certainly fault it for simply adding to unconstitutional statutes, rather than repealing them and replacing them with new ones. But the newspaper’s literal description of what the bill would do was quite wrong. Justin Katz is likewise upset with the newspaper for this.
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