Story thread · 2 reports / 2 sources

No, the founders did not ‘tell you so’

theblaze.com · 3h · first reportShare

H.L. Mencken believed in free speech “ up to the last limits of the endurable .” Apparently, that makes him a cuck nowadays. Mencken was a self-described “extreme libertarian” with little respect for authority. In 1926, when Boston banned an issue of his magazine, the American Mercury, over a mildly bawdy story called “ Hatrack ,” Mencken went to Boston, sold a copy himself, and got arrested for his trouble. Are we still rational? Some days I have my doubts. “Hatrack,” by Herbert Asbury — who later gave us “ The Gangs of New York ” — concerned a prostitute who took her Catholic customers to the Protestant cemetery and her Protestant customers to the Catholic cemetery. Scandalous stuff, once upon a time. Yet as absolutist as he professed to be, Mencken did not believe freedom of speech meant license to say anything to anybody under any circumstances. Although he rejected Catholic doctrine, he told an interviewer he had no right to plant himself outside a cathedral after High Mass and ha