Written By Bob Whitaker. Originally posted 17th September 2012 – https://www.whitakeronline.org/blog/2012/09/17/first-amendment-to-the-united-states-constitution/

“… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE PEACEABLY TO ASSEMBLE, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

There is not just a right to free speech. There is a right to hold meetings, ESPECIALLY meetings of people who are called “extremists.”

Approved people have no reason to NEED such a right to be specified.

I hear a lot about free speech from the big media, but nobody mentions the right to peaceably assemble.

This is in the Constitution because the people who wrote it were themselves threatened by death for meeting for “extremist” purposes.

It does NOT say “the right to assemble for a politically correct purpose.”

The usual way of forbidding our meetings, especially on campus, is by saying that, while police will protect anyone ELSE from being harassed, “they cannot protect people from violence” if the meetings are about heretical or extreme purposes. So our meetings are routinely forbidden because THOSE WHO ARE NOT MEETING PEACEABLY will cause trouble. So the right to peaceably assemble is thrown out because thugs won’t like the meetings.

Considering they, the Founding Fathers, put in the First Amendment because they themselves had been extremists and were threatened with thug violence, the idea that a group loses its right to free speech and assembly because THE OTHER SIDE might get violent with them would have been just what British authorities USED up to 1775.

When the Founding Fathers were talking “Treason” in 1775, someone who said it was OK to ban their meetings because they might cause riots — which they did — would not be looked upon as sane by the people who wrote the First Amendment.

Allowing heretical views and extremist views AND THE RIGHT TO ASSEMBLE despite thugs was PRECISELY the reason for the First Amendment.