Past, Present, and the Future of NASA (United States Senate Testimony)

AP Seminar

Section I Part A Suggested time – 30 minutes

Directions: Read the passage below and then respond to the following three questions.

1. Identify the author’s argument, main idea, or thesis.

2. Explain the author’s line of reasoning by identifying the claims used to build the argument and the connections between them.

3. Evaluate the effectiveness of the evidence the author uses to support the claims made in the argument.

Past, Present, and the Future of NASA (United States Senate Testimony) Neil DeGrasse Tyson – March 7, 2012

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

— Antoine St. Exupery

Currently, NASA’s Mars science exploration budget is being decimated, we are not going back to the Moon, and plans for astronauts to visit Mars are delayed until the 2030s—on funding not yet allocated, overseen by a congress and president to be named later.

During the late 1950s through the early 1970s, every few weeks an article, cover story, or headline would extol the “city of tomorrow,” the “home of tomorrow,” the “transportation of tomorrow.” Despite such optimism, that period was one of the gloomiest in U.S. history, with a level of unrest not seen since the Civil War. The Cold War threatened total annihilation, a hot war killed a hundred servicemen each week, the civil rights movement played out in daily confrontations, and multiple assassinations and urban riots poisoned the landscape.

The only people doing much dreaming back then were scientists, engineers, and technologists. Their visions of tomorrow derive from their formal training as discoverers. And what inspired them was America’s bold and visible investment on the space frontier.

Exploration of the unknown might not strike everyone as a priority. Yet audacious visions have the power to alter mind-states—to change assumptions of what is possible. When a nation permits itself to dream big, those dreams pervade its citizens’ ambitions. They energize the electorate. During the Apollo era, you didn’t need government programs to convince people that doing science and engineering was good for the country. It was self-evident. And even those not formally trained in technical fields embraced what those fields meant for the collective national future.

For a while there, the United States led the world in nearly every metric of economic strength that mattered. Scientific and technological innovation is the engine of economic growth—a pattern that has been especially true since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. That’s the climate out of which the New York World’s Fair emerged, with its iconic Unisphere—displaying three rings— evoking the three orbits of John Glenn in his Friendship 7 capsule.

During this age of space exploration, any jobs that went overseas were the kind nobody wanted anyway. Those that stayed in this country were the consequence of persistent streams of innovation that could not be outsourced, because other nations could not compete at our level. In fact, most of the world’s nations stood awestruck by our accomplishments.

Let’s be honest with one another. We went to the Moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. To think otherwise is delusion, leading some to suppose the only reason we’re not on Mars already is the absence of visionary leaders, or of political will, or of money. No. When you perceive your security to be at risk, money flows like rivers to protect us. But there exists another driver of great ambitions, almost as potent as war. That’s the promise of wealth. Fully funded missions to Mars and beyond, commanded by astronauts who, today, are in middle school, would reboot America’s capacity to innovate as no other force in society can. What matters here are not spin-offs (although I could list a few: Accurate affordable Lasik surgery, Scratch resistant lenses, Cordless power tools, Tempurfoam, Cochlear implants, the drive to miniaturize of electronics…) but cultural shifts in how the electorate views the role of science and technology in our daily lives.

As the 1970s drew to a close, we stopped advancing a space frontier. The “tomorrow” articles faded. And we spent the next several decades coasting on the innovations conceived by earlier dreamers. They knew that seemingly impossible things were possible—the older among them had enabled, and the younger among them had witnessed the Apollo voyages to the Moon—the greatest adventure there ever was. If all you do is coast, eventually you slow down, while others catch up and pass you by.

All these piecemeal symptoms that we see and feel—the nation is going broke, it’s mired in debt, we don’t have as many scientists, jobs are going overseas—are not isolated problems. They’re part of the absence of ambition that consumes you when you stop having dreams. Space is a multidimensional enterprise that taps the frontiers of many disciplines: biology, chemistry, physics, astrophysics, geology, atmospherics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering. These classic subjects are the foundation of the STEM fields— science, technology, engineering, and math—and they are all represented in the NASA portfolio.

Epic space adventures plant seeds of economic growth, because doing what’s never been done before is intellectually seductive (whether deemed practical or not), and innovation follows, just as day follows night. When you innovate, you lead the world, you keep your jobs, and concerns over tariffs and trade imbalances evaporate. The call for this adventure would echo loudly across society and down the educational pipeline.

At what cost? The spending portfolio of the United States currently allocates fifty times as much money to social programs and education than it does to NASA. The 2008 bank bailout of $750 billion was greater than all the money NASA had received in its half- century history; two years’ U.S. military spending exceeds it as well. Right now, NASA’s annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that—a penny on a dollar—we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow.

How much would you pay to “launch” our economy?

How much would you pay for the universe? Part B

Suggested time – 60 minutes

Directions: Read the following two articles carefully, paying attention to their perspectives, implications, and limitations. Then, write an essay that compares the two arguments by evaluating their effectiveness. In your essay, address the relevance and credibility of the evidence each presents to support the authors’ lines of reasoning.

Article A

Against YA

By Ruth Graham (The Slate Book Review – June 5th, 2014)

As The Fault in Our Stars barrels into theaters this weekend virtually guaranteed to become a blockbuster, it can be hard to remember that once upon a time, an adult might have felt embarrassed to be caught reading the novel that inspired it. Not because it is bad—it isn’t—but because it was written for teenagers.

The once-unseemly notion that it’s acceptable for not-young adults to read young-adult fiction is now conventional wisdom. Today, grown-ups brandish their copies of teen novels with pride. There are endless lists of YA novels that adults should read, an “I read YA” campaign for grown-up YA fans, and confessional posts by adult YA addicts. But reading YA doesn’t make for much of a confession these days: A 2012 survey by a market research firm found that 55 percent of these books are bought by people older than 18. (The definition of YA is increasingly fuzzy, but it generally refers to books written for 12- to 17-year-olds. Meanwhile, the cultural definition of “young adult” now stretches practically to age 30, which may have something to do with this whole phenomenon.)

The largest group of buyers in that survey—accounting for a whopping 28 percent of all YA sales—are between ages 30 and 44. That’s my demographic, which might be why I wasn’t surprised to hear this news. I’m surrounded by YA-loving adults, both in real life and online. Today’s YA, we are constantly reminded, is worldly and adult-worthy. That has kept me bashful about expressing my own fuddy-duddy opinion: Adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children.

Let’s set aside the transparently trashy stuff like Divergent and Twilight, which no one defends as serious literature. I’m talking about the genre the publishing industry calls “realistic fiction.” These are the books, like The Fault in Our Stars, that are about real teens doing real things, and that rise and fall not only on the strength of their stories but, theoretically, on the quality of their writing. These are the books that could plausibly be said to be replacing literary fiction in the lives of their adult readers. And that’s a shame.

The Fault in Our Stars is the most obvious juggernaut, but it’s not the only YA book for which adults (and Hollywood) have gone crazy. Coming to theaters later this summer is If I Stay, based on Gayle Forman’s recent novel about a teenage girl in a coma. And DreamWorks just announced it bought the rights to Eleanor & Park, Rainbow Rowell’s outcast romance that Kirkus Reviews said “will captivate teen and adult readers alike.” Before these there were the bestsellers (and movies) The Perks of Being a Wallflower and It’s Kind of a Funny Story.

Adult fans of these books declare confidently that YA is more sophisticated than ever. This kind of thing is hard to quantify, though I will say that my own life as a YA reader way back in the early 1990s was hardly wanting for either satisfaction or sophistication. Books like The Westing Game and Tuck Everlasting provided some of the most intense reading experiences of my life. I have no urge to go back and re-read them, but those books helped turn me into the reader I am today. It’s just that today, I am a different reader.

I’m a reader who did not weep, contra every article ever written about the book, when I read The Fault in Our Stars. I thought, “Hmm, that’s a nicely written book for 13-year-olds.” If I’m being honest, it also left me saying “Oh, brother” out loud more than once. Does this make me heartless? Or does it make me a grown-up? This is, after all, a book that features a devastatingly handsome teen boy who says things like “I’m in love with you, and I’m not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things” to his girlfriend, whom he then tenderly deflowers on a European vacation he arranged.

That will sound harsh to these characters’ legions of ardent fans. But even the myriad defenders of YA fiction admit that the enjoyment of reading this stuff has to do with escapism, instant gratification, and nostalgia. As the writer Jen Doll, who used to have a column called “YA for Grownups,” put it in an essay last year, “At its heart, YA aims to be pleasurable.” But the very ways that YA is pleasurable are at odds with the way that adult fiction is pleasurable. There’s of course no shame in writing about teenagers; think Shakespeare or the Brontë sisters or Megan Abbott. But crucially, YA books present the teenage perspective in a fundamentally uncritical way. It’s not simply that YA readers are asked to immerse themselves in a character’s emotional life—that’s the trick of so much great fiction—but that they are asked to abandon the mature insights into that perspective that they (supposedly) have acquired as adults. When chapter after chapter in Eleanor & Park ends with some version of “He’d never get enough of her,” the reader seems to be expected to swoon. But how can a grown-up, even one happy to be reminded of the shivers of first love, not also roll her eyes?

Most importantly, these books consistently indulge in the kind of endings that teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to reject as far too simple. YA endings are uniformly satisfying, whether that satisfaction comes through weeping or cheering. These endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction. These endings are for readers who prefer things to be wrapped up neatly, our heroes married or dead or happily grasping hands, looking to the future. But wanting endings like this is no more ambitious than only wanting to read books with “likable” protagonists.

Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better than this. I know, I know: Live and let read. Far be it from me to disrupt the “everyone should just read/watch/listen to whatever they like” ethos of our era. There’s room for pleasure, escapism, juicy plots, and satisfying endings on the shelves of the serious reader. And if people are reading Eleanor & Park instead of watching Nashville or reading detective novels, so be it, I suppose. But if they are substituting maudlin teen dramas for the complexity of great adult literature, then they are missing something.

The heroine of The Fault in Our Stars finds messy, unresolved stories unacceptably annoying. Her favorite book ends mid-sentence, which drives her to try and learn the story’s “real” ending from its author: “I know it’s a very literary decision and everything and probably part of the reason I love the book so much, but there is something to recommend a story that ends.” True enough, and appropriate to the character, who finds the uncertainty of her own near future maddening. But mature readers also find satisfaction of a more intricate kind in stories that confound and discomfit, and in reading about people with whom they can’t empathize at all. A few months ago I read the very literary novel Submergence, which ends with a death so shattering it’s been rattling around in my head ever since. (If it's actually a death! Adult novels often embrace ambiguity.) But it also offers so much more: Weird facts, astonishing sentences, deeply unfamiliar (to me) characters, and big ideas about time and space and science and love. I’ve also gotten purer plot- based highs recently from books by Charles Dickens and Edith Wharton, whose age and canonhood have not stopped them from feeling fresh, true, and surprising. Life is so short, and the list of truly great books for adults is so long.

I do not begrudge young adults themselves their renaissance of fiction. I want teenagers and ambitious pre-teens to have as many wonderful books to read as possible, including books about their own lives. But I remember, when I was a young adult, being desperate to earn my way into the adult stacks; I wouldn’t have wanted to live in a world where all the adults were camped out in mine. There’s a special reward in that feeling of stretching yourself beyond the YA mark, akin to the excitement of graduating out of the kiddie pool and the rest of the padded trappings of childhood: It’s the thrill of growing up. But the YA and “new adult” boom may mean fewer teens aspire to grown-up reading, because the grown-ups they know are reading their books. When I think about what I learned about love, relationships, sex, trauma, happiness, and all the rest—you know, life—from the extracurricular reading I did in high school, I think of John Updike and Alice Munro and other authors whose work has only become richer to me as I have grown older, and which never makes me roll my eyes.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Shailene Woodley, the 22-year-old star of this weekend’s big YA-based film. “Last year, when I made Fault, I could still empathize with adolescence,” she told New York magazine this week, explaining why she is finished making teenage movies. “But I’m not a young adult anymore—I’m a woman.” Article B

Darkness Too Visible

By Meghan Cox Gurdon (The Wall Street Journal – June 4th, 2011)

Amy Freeman, a 46-year-old mother of three, stood recently in the young-adult section of her local Barnes & Noble, in Bethesda, Md., feeling thwarted and disheartened.

She had popped into the bookstore to pick up a welcome-home gift for her 13-year-old, who had been away. Hundreds of lurid and dramatic covers stood on the racks before her, and there was, she felt, "nothing, not a thing, that I could imagine giving my daughter. It was all vampires and suicide and self-mutilation, this dark, dark stuff." She left the store empty-handed.

How dark is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker than when you were a child, my dear: So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18.

Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail. Profanity that would get a song or movie branded with a parental warning is, in young-adult novels, so commonplace that most reviewers do not even remark upon it.

If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is. There are of course exceptions, but a careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds.

Now, whether you care if adolescents spend their time immersed in ugliness probably depends on your philosophical outlook. Reading about homicide doesn't turn a man into a murderer; reading about cheating on exams won't make a kid break the honor code. But the calculus that many parents make is less crude than that: It has to do with a child's happiness, moral development and tenderness of heart. Entertainment does not merely gratify taste, after all, but creates it.

If you think it matters what is inside a young person's mind, surely it is of consequence what he reads. This is an old dialectic—purity vs. despoliation, virtue vs. smut—but for families with teenagers, it is also everlastingly new. Adolescence is brief; it comes to each of us only once, so whether the debate has raged for eons doesn't, on a personal level, really signify.

As it happens, 40 years ago, no one had to contend with young-adult literature because there was no such thing. There was simply literature, some of it accessible to young readers and some not. As elsewhere in American life, the 1960s changed everything. In 1967, S.E. Hinton published The Outsiders, a raw and striking novel that dealt directly with class tensions, family dysfunction and violent, disaffected youth. It launched an industry.

Mirroring the tumultuous times, dark topics began surging on to children's bookshelves. A purported diary published anonymously in 1971, Go Ask Alice, recounts a girl's spiral into drug addiction, rape, prostitution and a fatal overdose. A generation watched Linda Blair playing the lead in the 1975 made-for-TV movie Sarah T: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic and went straight for Robin S. Wagner's original book. The writer Robert Cormier is generally credited with having introduced utter hopelessness to teen narratives. His 1977 novel, I Am the Cheese, relates the delirium of a traumatized youth who witnessed his parents' murder, and it does not (to say the least) have a happy ending.

Grim though these novels are, they seem positively tame in comparison with what's on shelves now. In Andrew Smith's 2010 novel, The Marbury Lens, for example, young Jack is drugged, abducted and nearly raped by a male captor. After escaping, he encounters a curious pair of glasses that transport him into an alternate world of almost unimaginable gore and cruelty. Moments after arriving he finds himself facing a wall of horrors, "covered with impaled heads and other dripping, black-rot body parts: hands, hearts, feet, ears, penises. Where the f— was this?" No happy ending to this one, either. In Jackie Morse Kessler's gruesome but inventive 2011 take on a girl's struggle with self-injury, Rage, teenage Missy's secret cutting turns nightmarish after she is the victim of a sadistic sexual prank. "She had sliced her arms to ribbons, but the badness remained, staining her insides like cancer. She had gouged her belly until it was a mess of meat and blood, but she still couldn't breathe." Missy survives, but only after a stint as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The argument in favor of such novels is that they validate the teen experience, giving voice to tortured adolescents who would otherwise be voiceless. If a teen has been abused, the logic follows, reading about another teen in the same straits will be comforting. If a girl cuts her flesh with a razor to relieve surging feelings of self-loathing, she will find succor in reading about another girl who cuts, mops up the blood with towels and eventually learns to manage her emotional turbulence without a knife.

Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self- destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue. That is not to discount the real suffering that some young people endure; it is an argument for taking care.

The novel Scars, a dreadfully clunky 2010 exercise by Cheryl Rainfield that School Library Journal inexplicably called "one heck of a good book," ran into difficulties earlier this year at the Boone County Library in Kentucky, but not because of its contents. A patron complained that the book's depiction of cutting—the cover shows a horribly scarred forearm—might trigger a sufferer's relapse. That the protagonist's father has been raping her since she was a toddler and is trying to engineer her suicide was not the issue for the team of librarians re-evaluating the book.

"Books like Scars, or with questionable material, those provide teachable moments for the family," says Amanda Hopper, the library's youth-services coordinator, adding: "We like to have the adult perspective, but we do try to target the teens because that's who's reading it." The book stayed on the shelves.

Perhaps the quickest way to grasp how much more lurid teen books have become is to compare two authors: the original Judy Blume and a younger writer recently hailed by Publishers Weekly as "this generation's Judy Blume." The real Judy Blume won millions of readers (and the disapprobation of many adults) with then-daring novels such as 1970's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, which deals with female puberty, 1971's Then Again, Maybe I Won't, which addresses puberty from a boy's perspective, and 1975's Forever, in which teenagers lose their virginity in scenes of earnest practicality. Objectionable the material may be for some parents, but it's not grotesque.

By contrast, the latest novel by "this generation's Judy Blume," otherwise known as Lauren Myracle, takes place in a small Southern town in the aftermath of an assault on a gay teenager. The boy has been savagely beaten and left tied up with a gas pump nozzle shoved down his throat, and he may not live. The protagonist of Shine, a 16-year-old girl and once a close friend of the victim, is herself yet to recover from a sexual assault in eighth grade; assorted locals, meanwhile, reveal themselves to be in the grip of homophobia, booze and crystal meth. Determined in the face of police indifference to investigate the attack on her friend, the girl relives her own assault (thus taking readers through it, too) and acquaints us with the concept of "bag fags," heterosexuals who engage in gay sex for drugs. The author makes free with language that can't be reprinted in a newspaper.

In the book business, none of this is controversial, and, to be fair, Ms. Myracle's work is not unusually profane. Foul language is widely regarded among librarians, reviewers and booksellers as perfectly OK, provided that it emerges organically from the characters and the setting rather than being tacked on for sensation. In Ms. Myracle's case, with her depiction of redneck bigots with meth-addled sensibilities, the language is probably apt.

But whether it's language that parents want their children reading is another question. Alas, literary culture is not sympathetic to adults who object either to the words or storylines in young-adult books. In a letter excerpted by the industry magazine, the Horn Book, several years ago, an editor bemoaned the need, in order to get the book into schools, to strip expletives from Chris Lynch's 2005 novel, Inexcusable, which revolves around a thuggish jock and the rape he commits. "I don't, as a rule, like to do this on young adult books," the editor grumbled, "I don't want to compromise on how kids really talk. I don't want to acknowledge those f—ing gatekeepers."

By f—ing gatekeepers (the letter-writing editor spelled it out), she meant those who think it's appropriate to guide what young people read. In the book trade, this is known as "banning." In the parenting trade, however, we call this "judgment" or "taste." It is a dereliction of duty not to make distinctions in every other aspect of a young person's life between more and less desirable options. Yet let a gatekeeper object to a book and the industry pulls up its petticoats and shrieks "censorship!"

It is of course understood to be an act of literary heroism to stand against any constraints, no matter the age of one's readers; Ms. Myracle's editor told Publishers Weekly that the author "has been on the front lines in the fight for freedom of expression."

Every year the American Library Association delights in releasing a list of the most frequently challenged books. A number of young- adult books made the Top 10 in 2010, including Suzanne Collins's hyper-violent, best-selling Hunger Games trilogy and Sherman Alexie's prize-winning novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. "It almost makes me happy to hear books still have that kind of power," Mr. Alexie was quoted saying; "There's nothing in my book that even compares to what kids can find on the Internet."

Oh, well, that's all right then. Except that it isn't. It is no comment on Mr. Alexie's work to say that one depravity does not justify another. If young people are encountering ghastly things on the Internet, that's a failure of the adults around them, not an excuse for more envelope-pushing.

Veteran children's bookseller Jewell Stoddard traces part of the problem to aesthetic coarseness in some younger publishers, editors and writers who, she says, "are used to videogames and TV and really violent movies and they love that stuff. So they think that every 12-year-old is going to love that stuff and not be affected by it. And I don't think that's possible."

In an effort to keep the most grueling material out of the hands of younger readers, Ms. Stoddard and her colleagues at Politics & Prose, an independent Washington, D.C., bookstore, created a special "PG-15" nook for older teens. With some unease, she admits that creating a separate section may inadvertently lure the attention of younger children keen to seem older than they are.

At the same time, she notes that many teenagers do not read young-adult books at all. Near the end of the school year, when she and a colleague entertained students from a nearby private school, only three of the visiting 18 juniors said that they read YA books. So it may be that the book industry's ever-more-appalling offerings for adolescent readers spring from a desperate desire to keep books relevant for the young. Still, everyone does not share the same objectives. The book business exists to sell books; parents exist to rear children, and oughtn't be daunted by cries of censorship. No family is obliged to acquiesce when publishers use the vehicle of fundamental free-expression principles to try to bulldoze coarseness or misery into their children's lives. AP Seminar

Section II Time – 90 Minutes

Directions: Read the four sources carefully, focusing on a theme or issue that connects them and the different perspectives each represents. Then, write a logically organized, well-reasoned, and well-written argument that presents your own perspective on the theme or issue you identified. You must incorporate at least two of the sources provided and link the claims in your argument to supporting evidence. You may also use the other provided sources or draw upon your own knowledge. In your response, refer to the provided sources as Source A, Source B, Source C, or Source D, or by the authors’ names.

Source A

Crackdowns on Free Speech Rise Across a Europe Wary of Terror By RAPHAEL MINDER FEB. 24, 2016

MADRID — A puppet show at an open square in Madrid during Carnival festivities this month featured a policeman who tried to entrap a witch. The puppet officer held up a little sign to falsely accuse her, using a play on words that combined Al Qaeda and ETA, the Basque separatist group.

Angry parents complained, and the real police stepped in. They arrested two puppeteers, who could now face as much as seven years in prison on charges of glorifying terrorism and promoting hatred.

Paradoxically, the puppeteers say in their defense, the police proved their point: that Spain’s antiterrorism laws are being misapplied, used for witch hunts.

Far from an isolated episode, the arrests on Feb. 5 are part of a lengthening string of prosecutions, including two against a rap musician and a poet, that have fueled a debate over whether freedom of protest and speech are under threat in Spain and elsewhere in Europe because of fears of terrorism.

Some European countries, with painful historical chapters of fascism and leftist extremism, have long placed stricter limits on political and hate speech than has the United States. For instance, denying the Holocaust can be prosecuted in Germany as well as France.

But some civil liberties groups and legal experts are growing increasingly alarmed at the broad ways such laws are being adapted as the specter of Islamic extremism becomes Europe’s new preoccupation.

Once such prohibitions become law, even if in response to real security concerns, there is no telling how the statutes could be applied in the future, they say.

The Spanish puppeteers are a case in point. They are being prosecuted under a law on the books in Spain for more than a decade and originally aimed at ETA. Responsible for the deaths of more than 800 Spaniards, the Basque separatist group declared a unilateral cease-fire in 2011.

Last year, however, the conservative government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy overhauled and strengthened the law, aiming this time at Islamic terrorism. Among other things, the changes raised the maximum prison sentence for first-time offenders to three years from two to virtually guarantee jail time.

Those steps coincided with the Rajoy government’s introduction of what has become known as a “gag law,” harshly penalizing unauthorized public demonstrations, which has drawn strong criticism at home and abroad.

“This is the latest very serious attack on freedom of expression,” said Joaquim Bosch, a spokesman for Judges for Democracy, an association of about 600 judges that focuses on human rights. “During the Franco dictatorship, troublesome artists went to prison, but not in democratic Spain.”

Even at the height of ETA’s violent campaign, Mr. Bosch noted, the law forbidding the glorification of terrorism was used “about two or three times a year.”

Last year, however, judges from Spain’s national court ruled on 25 such cases, absolving the defendants in only six of them. “The politicization of terrorism has been used as a smoke screen to deviate attention from social and corruption problems,” Mr. Bosch said. The widening application of antiterrorism laws related to speech extends beyond Spain, however, as countries across Europe struggle to balance civil liberties and security in the aftermath of two major terrorist attacks in Paris last year.

Even before those attacks, in November 2014, France reinforced a law similar to that in Spain, which punishes statements praising or inciting terrorism, as worries increased about homegrown radicalization and the influence of extremist groups online.

French lawmakers toughened the penalties — to up to five years in prison and a maximum fine of 75,000 euros (about $82,000), or up to seven years and a $110,000 fine if the statements were made online.

Since the attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, the French authorities have aggressively moved to enforce the law and have drawn criticism for rushing to convict people who made provocative statements, sometimes while drunk, that had little to do with actual extremism or terrorism.

In one of the most prominent cases, the comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala was convicted and received a two-month suspended prison sentence for a Facebook post that suggested sympathy with one of the gunmen in the Charlie Hebdo attack.

In the view of the Association of Victims of Terrorism, one of the groups in Spain now pressing charges against the puppeteers, their show amounted to an act of “praise and recognition for terrorist organizations that have caused so much pain and suffering within our society.”

Spain’s interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, also defended the use of the law to arrest the puppeteers at a time when “international terrorism is threatening our country.”

He condemned the show for including other anti-establishment scenes of violence, including the hanging of a judge and the rape of a nun. “To pretend that this is satire or dark humor seems to me an absurdity,” Mr. Fernández Díaz said.

But since the arrest of the puppeteers, Raúl García Pérez and Alfonso Lázaro de la Fuente, street protests have been held in their defense around the country.

The civic associations that organized a demonstration in Granada, where the puppet company was founded, said that “reality supersedes fiction” when artists go to prison for staging a spectacle based on the three-century-old British tradition of Punch and Judy shows, in which puppets were sometimes beaten to death.

Far from promoting terrorism, the Madrid show was intended to condemn “the criminalization of social protest,” the associations said.

According to Eric Sanz de Bremond, a lawyer for the puppeteers, the sign during the show was “used as false incriminating evidence, to prove a crime and never to praise terrorism.” A miniature anarchist notebook that was confiscated by the police was also only a stage prop, he said.

“This is a pure work of fiction and satire,” he said, noting that the puppet show had premiered in Granada “without any incident” in late January.

Inconsistent application, in fact, is one of the dangers of such statutes, said José Ignacio Torreblanca, a professor of political science at the National University of Distance Education.

“I think such laws take us on a dangerous slope toward arbitrariness in a democracy,” he said. “The problem with such a law is that it got drafted in a vague way and there is so little jurisprudence that its application becomes a lottery, dependent on whoever is the judge in the case.”

Ambiguity about where exactly the legal line sits can have its own chilling effect in stifling speech, encouraging self-censorship.

“We have passed such laws without first having a proper debate about where free speech should end,” he said, “so that most Spaniards aren’t now aware of the limits that have been placed and how that can play out in the courts.”

The boundary between terrorism and culture, and the limits of public protest, are being tested in other cases, as well.

César Montaña Lehmann, a Spanish singer known as César Strawberry who leads a rap metal band called Def Con Dos, is awaiting trial on accusations of posting offensive messages on Twitter praising terrorism. A public prosecutor wants him sentenced to 20 months in prison. Aitor Cuervo Taboada, a self-defined revolutionary poet, is set to appear in court on Thursday, facing a possible 18-month sentence for publishing writings that the public prosecution says glorify terrorism by praising ETA and offending its victims.

Even before formally taking office last June, Guillermo Zapata was forced to step down as Madrid’s designated councilor for culture for past posts on Twitter in which he offended Jews and a victim of an ETA bombing.

This month, a judge started proceedings to try Mr. Zapata for his “cruel humor” comment about the terrorism victim.

Last week, Rita Maestre, the spokeswoman for Madrid’s City Hall, appeared in court after being charged with offending religious feelings during a protest held in a university chapel five years ago.

Alongside other protesters, Ms. Maestre, who was a student at the time, lifted her top to reveal her bra, while shouting insults against the Catholic Church.

Facing a possible one-year prison sentence, Ms. Maestre told the court that it made no sense for a public university in a secular country to maintain a chapel. She expressed regret for causing offense, but insisted that “protests, as long as they are pacific, are legitimate.”

As for the puppeteers, they have not given interviews since spending five days in prison this month.

In a joint statement, however, they insisted the play was not intended to offend but to “tell a story of fiction that unfortunately has many similarities with the reality that we have had to live these days.”

Freedom of speech “isn’t the right to say just what one wants to hear,” the puppeteers argued. “Whoever understands it that way in reality doesn’t believe in it.”

Source B

“Charlie Hebdo Editorial Cartoon” – Dana Summers (2015) Source C

Why Spewing Hate at Funerals Is Still Free Speech By Adam Cohen Wednesday, Sept. 29, 2010

After Matthew Snyder, a U.S. Marine, was killed in Anbar province in Iraq in 2006, some uninvited guests showed up at his funeral at St. John's Catholic Church in Westminster, Md. The Rev. Fred W. Phelps Sr. of the Westboro Baptist Church and several family members came from Kansas holding signs reading "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," "God Hates Fags" and "You're Going to Hell."

There is no question it was hateful stuff. Phelps' self-styled church preaches that God is punishing America because of its tolerance for homosexuality, especially in the military. The Phelps family makes its point by holding protests at military funerals. The Phelpses also posted an "epic poem" online entitled "The Burden of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew A. Snyder," which, among other things, says to his parents, "you raised him for the devil."

Snyder's father, Albert Snyder, sued. He said that the protests, at the funeral of his only son, made him violently ill. He prevailed on his claims of invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress and won a large damage award, but that ruling was reversed on appeal.

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case. As the court begins its term — the traditional first Monday in October — the Phelps case is only one of several important ones on the docket. In Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the Justices will consider whether a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors violates the First Amendment. In NASA v. Nelson, the court will weigh whether government workers have a constitutional right not to answer personal questions asked by their employers. There are also significant sex-discrimination and citizenship cases.

But for drama and emotion — and formidable constitutional issues — none rivals Snyder v. Phelps. Phelps is a toxic force — the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have labeled his church a "hate group." The Snyders could hardly be more sympathetic. Albert Snyder said the Phelps protests aggravated his diabetes and his depression. He said he vomited when he read the "epic poem."

After his case went to trial, a jury awarded Albert Snyder $10.9 million in compensatory and punitive damages. The judge reduced the award but stood by the verdict. In reversing that decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the church's speech was protected. Much of it involved matters of "public concern," the court said, "including the issue of homosexuals in the military" and "the political and moral conduct of the United States and its citizens." The "epic poem" did not purport to be literal facts about Matthew Snyder but rather relied on "loose, figurative or hyperbolic language."

There is, not surprisingly, a groundswell of support for Albert Snyder's case before the Supreme Court. Majority leader Harry Reid and minority leader Mitch McConnell and 40 other Senators — ranging from Barbara Boxer on the left to David Vitter on the right — have signed a friend-of-the court brief urging the court to reverse the decision below and reinstate the verdict against Phelps. Another brief is signed by the attorneys general of 48 states and the District of Columbia.

Albert Snyder's claim can be framed so it does not seem to intrude too far on freedom of speech. There is no need, some of his supporters say, to hold that speech like Phelps' — horrible though it is — is not protected by the First Amendment. It is enough to say that this is a special situation: that funerals are unusually private, that the death of a child in the military is uniquely worthy of respect, and that a special zone of privacy should be carved out.

It is an emotionally appealing argument — who can read these facts and not hope that Phelps is gravely punished and Albert Snyder is comforted in his loss? The trouble is, once courts begin making exceptions of this sort, the First Amendment quickly gets whittled away. There are those who argue for creating free-speech exceptions for Nazis marching through the town square or for the burning of holy books of one sort or another. Almost everyone has some kind of speech they regard as intolerable — they just do not agree on what that speech is.

It is always perilous to guess what the Supreme Court will do, but earlier this year the Justices ruled that horrific videos of animal cruelty are protected speech. That 8-1 ruling suggested that the current court is not inclined to create new categories of unprotected speech.

Even for the most committed civil libertarian, it is hard to get excited about defending a hate-spewing minimob that targets the funeral of a dead soldier or signs saying "God Hates the USA. Thank God for 9/11." Still, it is important for the court to rule that this kind of expression lies within the First Amendment. We defend it not because these ideas are particularly worthy of being protected, but because all ideas, even the most loathsome, are.

Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York Times editorial board. Case Study, his legal column for TIME.com, appears every Wednesday. Source D

“Silence Dogood Letter to the Editor” – Benjamin Franklin (At the age of 16, Benjamin Franklin wrote a series of letters to the editor of the New England Courant using the pseudonym, or pen- name, of “Silence Dogood.” These fourteen letters were published by the Courant between April and October of 1722.)

To the Author of the New-England Courant.

S I R, No. VIII.

I prefer the following Abstract from the London Journal to any Thing of my own, and therefore shall present it to your Readers this week without any further Preface.

WITHOUT Freedom of Thought, the can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the Right of another. And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only bounds it ought to know.

This sacred Privilege is to essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together; and in those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own. Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Fteeness of Speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors.

This Secret was so well known to the Court of King Charles the First, that his wicked Ministry procured a Proclamation, to forbid the People to talk of Parliaments, which those Traytors had laid aside. To assert thee undoubted Right of the Subject, and defend his Majesty's legal Prerogative, was called Disaffecton, and punished as Sedition. Nay, People were forbid to talk of Religion in their Families. For the Priest had combined with the Ministers to cook up Tyranny, and Tuppress Truth and the Law, while the late King James, when Duke of York, went avowedly to Mass, Men were fined, imprisoned and undone, for saying he was a Papist: And that King Charles the Second might live more securely a Papist, there was an Act of Parliament made, declaring it Treason to say that he was one.

That Men ought to speak well of their Governours is true, while their Governours, deserve to be well spoken of, but to do publick Mischief, without hearing of it , is only the Prerogative and Felicity of Tyranny: A free People will be shewing that they are so, by their Freedom of Speech.

The Administration of Government, is nothing else but the Attendence of the Trustees of the People upon the Interest and Affairs of the People: And as it is the Part and Business of the People, for whole Sake alone all publick Matters are, or ought to be transacted, to see whether they be well or ill transacted, so it is the Interest, and ought to be the Ambition, of all honest Magistrates, to have their Deeds openly examined, and Publickly scann'd: Only the wicked Governours of Men dread what is said of them; Audivit Tiberis probra queis lacerabitur, atque perculsus est. The publick Censure was true, else he had not felt it bitter.

Freedom of Speech is ever the Symptom, as well as the Effect of a good Government. In old Rome, all was left to the Judgment and Pleasure of the People, who examined the publick Proceedings with such Discretion, & censured those who administred them with such Equity and Mildness, that in the space of Three Hundred Years, not five publick Ministers suffered unjustly. Indeed whenever the Commons proceeded to Violence, the great Ones had been the Agressors.

GUILT only dreads Liberty of Speech, which drags it out of its lurking Holes, and exposes its Deformity and Horrour to Day-light. Horatius, Valerius, Cincinnatus, and other vertuous and undesigning Magistrates of the Roman Commonwealth, had nothing to fear from Liberty of Speech. Their virtuous Administration, the more it was examin'd, the more it brightened and gain'd by Enquiry. When Valerius in particular, was accused upon some flight grounds of affecting the Diadem; he, who was the first Minister of Rome, does not accuse the People for examining his Conduct, but approved his Innocence in a Speech to them; and gave such Satisfaction to them, and gained such Popularitty to himself, that they gave him a new Name; inde cognomen factumi Publicola [illegible], to denote that he was their Favourite and their Friend-----Late deinde leges----Ante omnes de provocatoine ADVERSUS MAGISTRATUST AD POPULUM, Livii, lib. z. Cap. 8.

But things afterwards took another Turn. Rome with the Loss of its Liberty, lost also its Freedom of Speech; then Mens Words began to be feared and watched; and then first began the poysonous Race of Informers, banished indeed under the righteous Administration of Titus, Narrva, Trajan, Aurelius, & c. but encouraged and enriched under the vile Ministry of Sejanus, Tigillinis, Pallas, and Cleander; Queri libet, quod in secreta, nostra non inquirant principes, nist quos Odimus, says Pliny to Trajan. The best Princes have ever encouraged and Promoted Freedom of Speech; they know that upright Measures would defend themselves, and that all upright Men would defend them. Tacitus, speaking of the Reign of some of the Princes above mention'd says with Extasy, Rara Temporum felicitate, ubi sentire qua velis, & qua sentias dicere lices: A blessed Time when you might think what you would, and speak what you thought.

I doubt not but old Spencer and his Son, who were the Chief Ministers and Betryers of Edward the Second, would have been very glad to have stopped the Mouths of all the honest Men in England. They dreaded to be called Traytors, because they were Traytors. I dare say, Queen Elizabeth's Walsingham, who deserved no Reproaches, feared none. Misrepressentation of publick Measures is easily overthrown, by representing publick Measures truly; when they are honest, they ought to be publickly known, that they may be publickly commended, but if they are knavish or pernicious, they ought to be publickly exposed, in order to be pubickly detested.

Yours, &c,

SILENCE DOGOOD.