First Things: Why We Whisper: Restoring Our Right to Say It’s Wrong
By Jim DeMint and J. David Woodard
Thursday, January 17, 2008

Excerpt: "A country once confident is its values and optimistic about its future is now pessimistic, nervous and confused. Traditional American institutions like the Boy Scouts, churches, businesses, college campuses, and public schools are routinely targeted for attack and expanding government regulation. Morally responsible Americans are forced to withdraw into the shadows of public opinion, where their freedoms of speech are reduced to whispers. The culmination of this silence portends a frightening future.

After World War II, an American journalist returned to Germany to live in a remote town in hopes of discovering why law-abiding citizens followed the leadership of Adolf Hitler. Milton Mayer interviewed ten average families, and in one of the more revealing sections of his book, They Thought They Were Free, he asked why the townspeople didn’t protest the abuses of the state. A policeman related the story of a local leader who was arrested in 1933 and “taken away” without being charged with anything. When Mayer asked why there was no outcry from citizens, the policeman told him that the people, by their silence, had given the government that right. There were “no open trials for enemies of the state,” he said. “They had forfeited their right to it.” the rest