CENSORSHIP BEGINS BY controlling unpopular views.
Banning books helps to protect the general public from degenerate ideas. Political statements are banned to protect the peace and the general welfare. Controlling ideas is always done with the best of motives by the best of people. People who know what's right for everyone.
Take cigarettes please.
The tobacco companies want to advertise their product, which, in typical usage, is a poison. Cigarettes are bad for people, so, the logic goes, cigarette ads shouldn't be allowed on TV. Paid speech advertising is seen as unprotected speech. You don't have 1st Amendment rights if you're paying to get your view on TV. This is suposed to be a ``positive'' censorship that will stop the merchants of death from entrapping more gullible consumer/victims. The problem is that this same logic can be applied in an ever-widening net.
Alcohol and cough syrups can be abused and can be life threatening. Let's ban advertising for them too. In fact, rappelling, sky diving, and scuba diving are statistically murderous like cigarettes. The same is true for fatty food and driving. Let's only allow advertising for products and services that a consciencious parent would give, unsupervised, to a six-year-old.
Of course, these arguments have gone over the precipice of hyperbolic exaggeration. The point is: one logic fits all. When one unpopular message is disallowed in order to protect people from themselves, the prohibition of other messages will certainly follow.
Even if you hate what a person or group or corporation has to say, you've got to recognize their right to say it. Even if they're trying to make money by statistically killing you. Even if the seductive belly-dancers of advertising write love poems designed to lure you into an early death. Anything that's legal to consume should be legal to advertise.
Because, in the ever widening net of censorship, you may one day find your statements prohibited. Your beliefs forbidden. Your choice of what to consume or say, made illegal by someone who knows, better than you do, what's best for you.
