Consider the following,:
1. A woman has the absolute right to kill her baby until the moment it exits her uterus. She can also dismember it and torture it by burning it with saline fluid, plucking off its limbs, crushing its bones, or sucking its brains out.
These actions are guarded ferociously as her “right to privacy” by the entire intellectual establishment that silently blacks out or distorts descriptions of these killings. Some 50 million babies have been killed in the past few decades but this holocaust is left to private conscience only. Women or their doctors are not punished for it at all. In fact, they’re applauded and public funding is used to pay for it, even while that part of the public that doesn’t go along with abortion is demonized.
2. An eighty-year-old man makes a few untoward remarks to a girlfriend in the privacy of their bedroom. The tapes are recorded. and published. He is denounced as a disgusting racist with no right to his opinions and he is deprived of his property rights.
Leading “libertarian” activists say nothing or defend the media’s position. They tell people they ought not to say anything in private they can’t say in public. This is a thought-control much greater than that under Sharia law, which all these activists would denounce, correctly. None of them sees the contradiction.
No one thinks of simply ignoring and not linking the Sterling material. Instead, they all follow the media’s cue automatically, as though pulled by invisible strings. Then they call themselves “fiercely independent” and talk about “freedom,:” “free speech,” “free choice,” “self-ownership” and other flattering mythologies with a straight face.
Meanwhile, so-called “evil statists” are the only ones arguing that the the recordings are on their face illegal and should not be distributed in the public realm.
The parameters of debate in the much-vaunted “free press” are set by media barons who profit from cheap gossip and extortion (which lowers the cost of running a paper, since the public does the reporting for free or for small sums), pornographers, and paid operatives of the government posing as private actors.
No one considers this a gross conflict of interest. The media barons are presumed not to have political agendas and presumed not to manipulate in collusion.
Nor is this manipulation termed what it is – an extension of the state into the private sphere. It is all deemed “free market” unproblematically.
3. The same people attack anyone who criticizes a paid porn performer for her consciously public acts. They argue that she has a right to privacy even though she sold her porn pictures to a public company voluntarily.
I actually agree with that argument, but those who deny a Donald Sterling his privacy can surely have no justification for giving a Belle Knox hers.
With equal confusion, recording the private sexual behavior of Tyler Clementi (the gay Rutgers freshman who committed suicide) is a vicious assault on his privacy and dignity (it is), but recording the speech of a Donald Sterling is a righteous act of public policing (it is not).
4. The same people who attack Donald Sterling’s private speech and hold it to an arbitrarily decided public standard also denounce theocracy (with its logically entailed blasphemy laws) as an insupportable and “medieval” intrusion into free speech and thought. And they declare themselves the embodiment of “reason” against the “irrationality” of the religious.
5. The same critics of Sterling who believe it is legitimate for him to lose his livelihood over private speech within his bedroom have a fit over the most minor constraint placed on their right to use speech in public to degrade, inflame, incite, defraud, mislead, or titillate. They even object to any constraint placed on their right to disseminate for commercial profit the vilest images, even where they would be accessible by minors.
They defend their right to view violent child pornography, even though that right supplies the demand that drives a global market of child abuse and murder and though the act of viewing itself has been deemed criminal.
But while the act of viewing child-porn is criminal, the act of dismembering a child is deemed “private” and protected.
The left also defends without any nuance or moderation the right to publish “art” that inflames the public, even where major violence could result as in the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, which, as it turns out, were a deliberate provocation from a neo-con flack.