If the Bill of Rights embodies citizens’ rights that are sacred, natural and God-given (and I believe they are), then it is our duty to defend them against anyone or anything that tries to diminish them.
And, if what I just said is true, then the first natural right that God gave us in the Bill of Rights is freedom of conscience and expression - the First Amendment.
Any time that government tries to stifle that right for its own convenience or comfort, government violates the citizens’ natural right to complete citizenship in the United States. That should piss us all off.
Just such a circumstance occurred recently during a public meeting of the Wyoming Board of Pharmacy. At issue was the Board’s action against the license of City Drug, a popular Cheyenne pharmacy, for a mistake in labeling a prescription.
A crowd sympathetic to the pharmacy was in attendance at the meeting, but was prevented from commenting to the Board about their concerns. The Board just didn’t want to listen to any whining from the great unwashed.
Thus, the Wyoming Board of Pharmacy violated the requirement in the First Amendment that citizens are granted the right to peaceably assemble and to petition their government for redress of grievances.
The Board itself, in denying voice to citizens, created turmoil and citizen anger in the meeting by their knot-headedness, and the wheels came off, as one would expect.
Apparently, the Board felt “threatened” by the presence of citizens who were there to question the Board’s actions, and decided not to listen to the assembled voices of dissent.
Had the audience been an unruly mob armed with torches, pitchforks and guillotines, there would have been some justification for the board to feel threatened. But words of dissent are not deadly weapons. They are a God-given right.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who had obviously carefully read Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts on free speech contained in the “Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty” of 1777, addressed fear as a justification for abridging free speech.
In Brandeis’ opinion on Whitney v. California in 1927, we find this: “Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly.” I have doubts that the Wyoming Board of Pharmacy has studied this opinion.
For an arm of government to tremble in fear just because it worries that citizens might say something to disturb it, or hurt its feelings, or make it uncomfortable or even threaten it with words is behavior more suited to the British Crown in 1775 than it is to representative government in the U.S. today.
So, I will submit that the Wyoming Board of Pharmacy, with armed Highway Patrol officers providing security, were at no risk of life and limb from an unarmed crowd of Wyoming citizens exercising their rights under the First Amendment.
Shame on them! And shame on any agency of government – from the top down, and in any public venue – that denies their citizen employers the opportunity to engage in free speech directed against that government.
A government that refuses to listen to the governed, and denies citizens their right to speak up when they are dissatisfied, is a government that soon will have more than words to fear.
If you won’t take my word for it, just ask King George III.
Rod Miller can be reached at: RodsMillerWyo@yahoo.com
