Even Homer can defend our nation's 5 freedoms
By HOWARD TROXLER
Published March 5, 2006
There was some hand wringing last week over a poll that showed more Americans - a lot more - could name all five family members of the cartoon series The Simpsons but not the five freedoms we enjoy under the First Amendment.
About one out of five Americans (22 percent) could name all five Simpsons, according to a poll taken for the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum.
But only one out of a thousand (that's 0.1 percent) could nail the entire First Amendment. In fact, only one in four Americans could name even two of the amendment's five guarantees.
(In case you are sweating here: The answers are Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, and the freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly and the right to petition for redress of grievances.)
This is not as surprising as it seems.
The Simpsons have an unfair advantage. They are on television constantly, both in reruns and in the weekly show on Sunday nights on the Fox network.
Also, most of the time, The Simpsons is funny. The First Amendment, generally speaking, is not funny. Most of the people who are talking about it all the time are not funny either.
If we were smart, we would hire the Simpsons to push this First Amendment thing. I would even put each one of them in charge of a particular right.
Marge, who has boundless faith in her family and the goodness of the world, would defend the freedom of religion.
Bart would get free speech, naturally.
Lisa, who has the soul of a crusading journalist, would get the press.
Maggie, who for some reason chooses to stay with the rest of them, could take freedom of assembly.
And Homer - Homer, who somehow manages by begging to keep Marge's heart, the forbearance of his family and his job at the nuclear plant - he would be in charge of the right of petition.
We tend to think of these freedoms as separate ideas, but I do not believe they can be unraveled. They hang together.
The most fundamental right is the right to worship, or not worship, by one's own conscience. Hand in hand with that is the idea that it is wrong for the government to "establish" religion at all. Boy, how we like to fight over that one!
"Freedom of speech" often gets misunderstood. At its simplest, freedom of speech is that the government can't tell you what to say, or what you can't say. It does NOT mean you can insult your boss without consequence, or force other people to listen to you. It doesn't mean that other people have to like you, either.
As for freedom of the press, the old joke used to be that it was only for those who owned a press. Today's "press" is more democratic than ever; everybody is just one click away from everybody else.
The freedom of assembly means the right to join with other Americans of like mind. Here, too, all the other rights would be meaningless if Americans could not join with each other - and I don't mean in penned-up "First Amendment zones."
Let's see, what's left? Petition. I always had special affection for that one and thought it needed extra help since it came last. It means that a free person can stand up and say to the government, "You are wrong, government, and I demand that you fix it." If you aren't allowed to seek justice from the government, what good is anything else?
The danger of not knowing that we have these freedoms, along with all the other freedoms in the Bill of Rights, is that we will surrender them without understanding their value, like throwing away a winning lottery ticket.
That's a good analogy - we are the winners of a historical "lottery," after all, one that took about 5,000 years of civilization before turning up in the amazing five-way combination in the First Amendment. Yet we are tempted daily to forfeit it.
So, how do we make these freedoms universally known and understood? The answer is, not in a fell stroke, not by a new law or by a standardized test in school, but by a little each day, by constant reminders to each other and our children of what makes the U.S. Constitution special. Without it we would be just a bunch of Homers. D'oh!