Ok, back to the topic we were just on. The organizer of “Mothers Against Maddox”, Beth Robbins, can be reached at mothersagainstmaddox@yahoo.com. This is the e-mail I just sent her:

You saw the subject line. I love the United States of America, and I love the Bill of Rights, and most importantly, I love the freedom that we Americans have to express ourselves, the freedom given to us by our Founding Fathers through the First Ammendment of our Constitution; a freedom defended by hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women who have served, fought, and died for centuries in wars across the globe, so that we may enjoy the freedoms which, as so tritely put by so many, “are not free”. To come to your website and see you lie so blatantly about your appreciation for the First Ammendment, while at the same time trying to destroy Maddox’s right to practice his freedom of speech, filled me with such a burning rage at the “pleasure police” who attempt to make the world safe for all of us. Look at your web browser - see the “X” in the top right corner? If you don’t like Maddox’s website, click that “X.” Don’t go there. But don’t tell the rest of us where we can’t go, it really smacks of facism.

I was thinking about signing the petition with a shorter version of this, but decided against it.

When someone starts out by saying, “I support freedom of speech on the internet”, you can always tell it’s is going to be followed by something very much like the following: “but not when it HARMS children.”

So, essentially, this individual in question is for *certain* freedom of *certain* speech, provided it does not advocate something this individual disagrees with. Idiot. If you’re wondering, those above quotes were the product of Mothers Against Maddox, a website whose name implies the same type of noble cause embodied by Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.

Except MADD is all about preventing people from driving drunk, and MAM is about shutting down the First Ammendment of the United States of America. Gosh. I don’t like MAM. If you’ve never been to Maddox’s website, be warned ahead of time that it is the “Best Page in the Universe”, and per Maddox’s description, “This page is about me and why everything I like is great. If you disagree with anything you find on this page, you are wrong.”

If you like satire and dark humor, fair bet, you’ll like this page. Even if you don’t, send an e-mail to these self-appointed guardians of that which determines what we can and can’t hear. Oh, guess what, if I don’t like Maddox’s website, I can just click the little “x” in the top right. And if you don’t like Maddox’s website, well, see the little “x” in the top right hand corner? Click it closed, ya whores.

Hard to believe. I’m not going to post a long “what I was doing”, I just want to remember a moment, in the student union at Towson University, when CNN aired, without edit, a woman screaming “Jesus fucking Christ” as the second airplane impacted.

That CNN wouldn’t edit the word, and especially the context of the words it was surrounded by, sort of reinforced the feeling … of pain, emptiness, sorrow, shock … all I thought and more.

Three years. Wow.