By Gene Policinski
First Amendment Center

As the First Amendment marks its 217th anniversary on Dec. 15, here’s a quick look at where our basic freedoms stand – starting with a free press:

As 2008 ends, most newspapers are shrinking dramatically in size, staffing, circulation. At least a few sizable cities – including, at one point, Portland, Maine – have faced the possibility of having no local daily newspaper at all. Analysts predict similar changes in local and network broadcasting in 2009.

Ironically, this “free press” vanishing act is propelled in no small part by “free media” (as in “no charge”).

Even as the Internet and new technology spur new and ever-more-varied methods of sending and receiving news and information, they are helping to decimate once-lucrative business models that supported what we now call mainstream media.

In one sense, this latest American media revolution also is about opportunity, and a return to its individual, locally owned, locally focused roots. In our early history the emphasis was on the opportunities of a free press, not its size or wealth. No longer was a king’s license required, a king’s voice the only one heard, or a king’s wrath to be feared.

Echoing that history, an explosion of community bloggers and community online ventures is providing commentary and some reporting, and Yahoo, Google, America Online and other sites are piling up regular users though they originate little reporting of their own.

But while there’s more news and information available, the First Amendment question of the year – and likely for the next several years – is whether the “watchdog” role of a free press will carry over from the “dead tree” media to their electronic progeny. Some blogs fill the bill: Multiple sites reporting on the U.S. Supreme Court are an example. But there is no new-media machinery yet in place to provide most of us with expert, year-after-year reporting and tracking of courts, legislatures, police departments, schools and taxes.

A free press as an effective check on government is what the nation’s Founders had in mind when they provided constitutional shelter for scribes of their time and ours. Individual expression and opinion are vital in a democracy, but so are accurate information and public accountability. And for more than two centuries, we’ve been able to expect all of that from a free press – even if it cost us some coins to purchase the means of reporting.

New technology is creating other First Amendment challenges, as well:
- President-elect Obama’s successful fundraising, with a powerful online component, attracted $750 million as he spurned public funding. In the process he challenged a creaky system of federal campaign-finance limits that some maintain improperly limit free speech. In this year’s State of the First Amendment national survey, support declined for limits on contributions.
- Social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace spawned controversies ranging from defamation flaps between school administrators and students to a trend involving teens’ sending naked or semi-naked pictures of themselves to friends – triggering child-pornography charges.
- Spurred by a teen’s suicide, Missouri lawmakers enacted a law making online harassment – “cyberbullying” – a crime.
Not all First Amendment challenges are electronic in nature:
- In Boston, a Rastafarian man will get his day in an appeals court challenging as religious discrimination a Jiffy Lube company policy requiring him to cut his hair and shave off his beard. A lower court held the company had a right to control its public image and that it did not have to exempt the employee because of his beliefs.
- Legal fights erupted in several state courts over vanity or specialty license plates, prompted by individuals seeking to display creative messages or by state-approved slogans like “In God We Trust” or “Choose Life.”
- Laws to ban picketing at military funerals were challenged in several Midwestern courts, and a small protest group vowed to fight criminal charges.
- On a Sunday in September, pastors in as many as 22 states defied an Internal Revenue Service regulation barring direct candidate endorsement from the pulpit under penalty of their churches’ losing tax-exempt status.

And with the holiday season, one more First Amendment debate is worth noting. In Washington state, officials permitted atheists to post a message alongside a Capitol hallway Nativity scene. That upset some, including demonstrators who marched around the building with protest signs – exercising their rights of free speech, free press, assembly and petition.

All in all, a pretty vigorous 2008 workout for a 217-year-old.

Gene Policinski is vice president and executive director of the First Amendment Center, 555 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001. Web: www.firstamendmentcenter.org. E-mail: gpolicinski@fac.org. Article provided courtesy of Media General News Service.

RALEIGH, N.C. – Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole is back on the airwaves with a new ad that again decries her rival’s ties to an atheist group.

Dole says in the ad airing Friday that the faith of Democratic state Sen. Kay Hagan is not the question. The incumbent says the facts are that Godless Americans held a fundraiser in her honor in Boston.

An adviser for Godless Americans held a fundraiser at his home. The event was not billed as a Godless Americans event, and other hosts included an ambassador and U.S. Sen. John Kerry.

Hagan has already filed suit against Dole, saying an initial ad on the subject was defamatory. Lawyers for Dole’s campaign filed a motion on Friday to dismiss the suit.

The letter, from the law firm Boyce & Isley, PLCC to Hagan’s attorneys at Parker Poe Adams and Bernstein, LLP, was delivered to Hagan’s campaign.

Dole ends her new ad by asking voters, “If Godless Americans threw a party in your honor, would you go?”

U.S. Senate Candidate Kay Hagan filed a lawsuit Thursday against Elizabeth Dole and the Elizabeth Dole Committee, Inc., after Dole declined to remove her new television ad that calls Hagan “godless.”

RALEIGH, N.C. – Democratic Senate candidate Kay Hagan angrily demanded Wednesday that incumbent Sen. Elizabeth Dole take down a new ad that questions the challenger’s ties to an atheist political group, calling the spot a slanderous and pathetic attempt to maintain political power.

Hagan’s attorneys sent a cease-and-desist order to Dole’s campaign, saying the “libelous” ad should come down within 24 hours. The order promised legal action if the ad stays on the air.

“It is so unbecoming of a woman like Elizabeth Dole,” Hagan said. “This is a fabricated, pathetic ad. How dare she attack my faith. Is Elizabeth Dole that desperate to keep this Senate seat?”

A Dole campaign spokesman said they had no plans to remove the ad from the air.

“It’s silly and ridiculous,” said spokesman Dan McLagan. “Clearly the Hagan folks are panicked that they got caught going to a fundraiser with a group that the vast majority of North Carolinians would find objectionable.”

Dole’s ad questions why Hagan would attend a fundraiser at the home of a man who serves as an adviser to the Godless Americans Political Action Committee. The group mobilizes atheists to emphasize the separation of church and state and other issues.

Hagan, who went to the September fundraiser at the Boston home of activist Woody Kaplan, is a Christian who teaches Sunday school at her local church. She held a news conference Wednesday with her pastor and family to defend herself.

Dole’s ad comes as a new Associated Press-GfK poll shows Hagan with a slight advantage over Dole, 47 percent to 43 percent. The poll was conducted Oct. 22-26 and included 601 likely voters. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
 
The 30-second television spot shows clips of some members of the Godless Americans Political Action Committee talking about some of their goals – such as taking “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance and removing “In God We Trust” from money.

“Godless Americans and Kay Hagan. She hid from cameras. Took Godless money. What did Hagan promise in return?” the narrator says in the ad.
 
The video ends by showing a picture of Hagan while another woman – Godless Americans PAC executive director Ellen Johnson – declares in the background, “There is no God!”

McLagan said the end of the ad was not misleading, arguing the woman’s voice is clearly not the Democratic lawmaker. He said the spot does not question Hagan’s faith, only why she would associate with a group with an atheist agenda.

“The concern is that she’s going to support judges that have the same world view that she’s taking money from – or oppose judges who have the opposite” world view, McLagan said.

Hagan said she had never heard of the Godless Americans PAC until Dole’s campaign raised the issue prior to the event. The fundraiser had a number of other hosts.
 
“My question is, does Elizabeth Dole vet her supporters based on religious beliefs?” Hagan said.

Watch the ad:

NEW YORK – Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin says she supports a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, a break with John McCain who has said he believes states should be left to define what marriage is.

In an interview with Christian Broadcasting Network, the Alaska governor said she had voted in 1998 for a state amendment banning same sex marriage and hoped to see a federal ban on such unions.

“I have voted along with the vast majority of Alaskans who had the opportunity to vote to amend our Constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman. I wish on a federal level that’s where we would go. I don’t support gay marriage,” Palin said. She said she believed traditional marriage is the foundation for strong families.

McCain, an Arizona senator, is supporting a ballot initiative in his state this year that would ban gay marriage. But he has consistently and forcefully opposed a federal marriage amendment, saying it would usurp states’ authority on such matters.

As governor, Palin vetoed a bill that would have denied benefits to the partners of gay state employees. In a debate with Democratic rival Joe Biden, Palin said she was “tolerant” of gays and said she supported certain legal protections for same-sex couples, like hospital visitation rights.

In the CBN interview, Palin also said she would speak out if she heard a supporter at a rally yell violent or threatening comments about Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee.

“What we have heard through some mainstream media is that folks have hollered out some atrocious and unacceptable things like ‘kill him,”‘ Palin said, referring to a Washington Post story two weeks ago about angry supporters at a Palin rally in Florida. “If I ever were to hear that standing up there at the podium with the mike, I would call them out on that, and I would tell these people, no, that’s unacceptable.”

CBN released excerpts of the interview Monday and planned to broadcast it in its entirety Tuesday.

Palin also claimed religion and God had been “mocked” during the campaign, although she offered no evidence to support that.

“Faith in God in general has been mocked through this campaign, and that breaks my heart and that is unfair for others who share a faith in God and choose to worship our Lord in whatever private manner that they deem fit,” she said.

Palin is a conservative Christian who was baptized and grew up attending Pentecostal churches. In September, Obama defended Palin’s religious beliefs and said it would be “offensive” to portray her faith as strange or wrong.

Palin also reaffirmed her view that Obama had been “palling around with terrorists” because of his association with Bill Ayers, a 1960s-era radical who helped found the violent Weather Underground group to protest the Vietnam war. The group was responsible for bombings of several government buildings.

“I would say it again,” she said.

Ayers and Obama live in the same Chicago neighborhood and have served together on charity boards. Ayers also hosted a house party for Obama when he was first running for the Illinois state Senate.