Defending free speech is like being in love with a gifted but temperamental artist who is forever embarrassing you with his drunken public outbursts. You want to nurture your beloved's creativity, but sometimes you wish you could just leave the bloviating SOB at home.
He goes on to say that laws restricting protestors around abortion clinics are counterproductive. Alas, he doesn't bring up the feelings of women who are called all kinds of vile things on their way into a clinic. Dickerson says that those targeted for restraint, such as Rev. Donald Spitz, leader of the Army of God, might be emboldened to
act out violently -- not because they're "frustrated," as Spitz maintains, but because all the fuss government makes over their words fans their grandiose delusions.
Of course, the powers that be want to muzzle me, the targets of censorship tell themselves, because what I believe is so powerful, so transcendentally true, that if I were allowed to say it aloud the powers that be would be shaken to their foundations.
The reality is quite different. The reality is that the more you hear someone like Spitz explain himself, the more clearly you understand how far 'round the bend he has gone, and that whatever is eating him probably has less to do with abortion than with how someone bullied little Donny around when he was three or four.
More than it exposes us to violence, the unfettered speech of extremists exposes their own irrationality. Such exposure is a civilized society's most powerful weapon against the lunatic fringe, and we should encourage them whenever they choose to turn it on themselves.
Rev. (sic) Donald Spitz’s opinion on the beliefs or behavior of others should carry no weight whatsoever. He uses his own website to try to make heroes out of murdering terrorists like Paul Hill, Eric Rudolph, John Salvi, and James Kopp. Therefore, the recent designation by the Virginia State Police of Spitz's Army of God as a domestic terrorist group is totally appropriate. He is so delusional that he thinks that he was ordained by the International Gospel Crusade, a denomination that only exists in his imagination. This makes Spitz even more of a concern.
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