It’s pretty sad when a law professor apparently gets their legal advice from Joy Behar of The View.
Only weeks after Behar suggested “tweaking” the First and Second Amendments, University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks suggested a “redo” of the first two amendments to the Bill of Rights, according to Legal Insurrection.
.@JoyVBehar and her co-hosts of @TheView got a little too excited by the idea of government and social media companies taking away your rights. https://t.co/4TUs1OFi72
— NewsBusters (@newsbusters) December 1, 2021
In a column written for the far-left Boston Globe, Franks, author of the book “The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech,” claims that the neither of the first two amendments to our Constitution “is a model of clarity or precision,” and noted that “both are deeply flawed” with regard to free expression and self-defense, The College Fix reports.
.@ma_franks proposes that the Second Amendment be rewritten to include: ‘the right of self-determination in reproductive matters.” https://t.co/Xh0TdtOp2M
— The College Fix (@CollegeFix) December 20, 2021
Franks wrote that both amendments are “highly susceptible to being read in isolation from the Constitution as a whole,” as well as their “commitment to equality and the collective good.”
Collective good? Think we’ve heard that before.
She wrote:
The First and Second Amendments tend to be interpreted in aggressively individualistic ways that ignore the reality of conflict among competing rights.
This in turn allows the most powerful members of society to reap the benefits of these constitutional rights at the expense of vulnerable groups.
Both amendments would be improved by explicitly situating individual rights within the framework of ‘domestic tranquility’ and the ‘general welfare’ set out in the Constitution’s preamble.
Want to know why lawyers coming out of Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and so on are so far-left radical? They have people such as Franks poisoning their minds with this claptrap.
Franks is hardly alone where college leftist professors are concerned. For example, Catharine MacKinnon, a feminist product of the University of Michigan says that “free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice.”
“Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful,” MacKinnon wrote.
“Legally, what was, toward the beginning of the 20th century a shield for radicals, artists, and activists, socialists, and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists, and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections.”
Under her updated First Amendment, Franks suggests, in part:
Every person has the right to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, and petition of the government for redress of grievances, consistent with the rights of others to the same and subject to responsibility for abuses.”
The last part of that is chilling, as noted by The College Fix. “Responsibility for abuses?”
Do we want the government deciding what constitutes “abuse?”
Think Fakebook and Twitter “fact-checkers,” on steroids.
The proposed rewrite of the Second Amendment is, well… bizarre to say the least. Contained therein is “a provision for abortion rights,” The College Fix notes:
All people have the right to bodily autonomy consistent with the right of other people to the same, including the right to defend themselves against unlawful force and the right of self-determination in reproductive matters.” [emphasis added]
To make matters much worse, there is a second part:
The government shall take reasonable measures to protect the health and safety of the public as a whole. [emphasis added]
What could possibly go wrong with that? Do you want the federal government, a bureaucrat like Fauci being able to force measures to protect the health and safety of the public as a whole?
The College Fix previously reported on Franks suggesting the federal government should be allowed to police social media for people posting “medical misinformation” under the threat of federal prosecution.
Here’s what she said:
Prohibiting a narrow category of factually false health information that causes measurable harm is consistent with the First Amendment. My own view is that this would probably be better accomplished by making such misinformation a fedearl [sic] criminal offense, to which Section 230 doesn’t apply.
Just saying, don’t think we should be taking legal advice from someone who doesn’t know how to spell.
Think this is far-fetched? There is actually a proposal from failed Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) which would do just that. According to Matthew Ingraham of the Columbia Journalism Review, who was having a discussion with Franks:
The bill seems to be trying to carve out a loophole where the First Amendment wouldn’t apply, provided the information in question was specifically defined by the government or its agents as being health-related disinformation, and that it was being circulated during a pandemic or other crisis. Do you think that argument has any merit, or any hope of succeeding?
Franks has also made some bizarre comments about the #MeToo movement.
For more on Joy Behar’s complete lack of common sense, we invite you to read our previous report:
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