this <\/a> judge? If so of what kind? Or is this to be viewed as okay in the interest of free speech? Thanks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nFirstly, freedom of speech does not mean that an employee can exercise it on an employer’s time. It also does not mean that you can exercise it on my property without my consent. For example, this is my blog and it is upto me what comments I let you make here. Forcing me to give a forum for everyone is actually a violation of my<\/i> freedom of speech. <\/p>\n
The judge has his freedom of speech as a citizen. But he is also an employee of the government and ultimately, us. We are certainly entitled to put restrictions on his speech as a condition of his employment. In fact, we should. The freedoms of ordinary citizens depend on the idea that a private citizen can do everything except those that are specifically prohibited, while government officials can do only what is specifically permitted.<\/p>\n
Of course, it is not always clear where to draw the line between a government official’s private life and public life, and it is not always clear how much freedom to permit an official in his public life. We put the restriction that those in the military cannot publicly discuss their political views at all, though they certainly can hold and express views privately, and they can vote. It would be silly to put exactly the same restriction on a politician. <\/p>\n
But then, what restrictions can we in fact put? In a secular country, a politician as a private citizen has a right to practise his religion, but as a government official, he has no right to favour one religion over another or do anything that makes it sound like religion is part of government policy. But what do we do when a politician uses religious imagery and quotes from the Bhagavad Geeta to pep up citizens for a war? (Let us assume that the war itself is just.) Religious texts do have a significance that go beyond religion, and they extend into philosophy and literature too. In these cases, we have to draw the lines on a case by case basis – and though I have a morbid fear of doing things on a case-by-case basis, here I can see that it is unavoidable. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sorry for the delay. No, the promise was not an April fool’s joke. I just got busy with a lot of stuff, one of them being my flight back to India. So on to the first question, by froginthewell, who asked way back: Would you say there should be a legislation that will punish this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ravikiran.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}