But if I were, I’d be willing to lay 2 to 1 odds that the Supreme Court will strike down the federal Defense of Marriage Act and recognize gay unions.

Constitutional law is filled with contradictory language and murky doctrine, and trying to predict court rulings is about as easy as drawing an inside straight at the poker tables. But this one seems to me like it ought to be a constitutional no-brainer, at least to the intellectually honest members of the court.

Not since the 19th century has the court ruled that it was constitutionally permissible to discriminate against an entire class of people, which is exactly what the federal law – as well as similar state laws – tries to do. The arguments deployed against gay marriage have more to do with religious morality than they do constitutional law, because, frankly, there aren’t any good legal arguments to be made against it.

Some suggest the states ought to be free to regulate marriage, as they have always traditionally done, but nothing in the Constitution gives the majority the right to discriminate against the minority, at least not since the passage of the 14th Amendment a century and a half ago. So as long as the law confers economic advantages on married couples, consenting adults should have the right to marry whom they choose. At least at the courthouse down the street, if not the church around the corner. No one is suggesting that churches should have to recognize gay marriages, only that the government must do so for the purposes of pensions, tax laws and other legal benefits enjoyed by married couples.

Now not so long ago, the debate wasn’t about the institution of marriage, but over whether the government should somehow recognize civil unions for gay couples. Until recently, the president himself took that position. And personally, I see nothing wrong with that compromise, in a strictly legal sense. But the cultural and moral clashes surrounding the issue have taken us past that point, and the legal debates surrounding gay marriage won’t go away until all unions are created equal.

The courts have finally struck down medieval laws against sodomy and adultery, laws which by the way applied equally to heterosexual as well as homosexual couples. Maybe it’s time to get the government entirely out of the marriage business. The only reason the government has to regulate any marriage is for the purposes of tax, property and pension laws. So instead of marriage, it seems to me we should only recognize civil unions in a secular society, whether they be straight or gay.

I don’t think gay marriages undermine the traditional institution of marriage; if anything, they celebrate and reaffirm the notions of love and commitment at the heart of the sacrament.

Many religious opponents of gay marriage would disagree. So they ought to welcome the idea that the government recognizes nothing more than legal commitment when it issues a marriage license. Leave the holy sacraments at the altar where they belong. That way, churches would be left free to marry whomever they chose, or not, depending on their own understanding of God’s laws.

That wouldn’t, of course, satisfy those who believe gay unions are a sin, those who believe they have the right to enact their own views of religious morality into the secular law. But I figure God can enforce his own commandments and doesn’t need the help of the federal government. If, as some insist, God frowns on gay unions, that’s between them and God and we should leave the justice of the peace out of it.

The complexities of constitutional law make my head hurt, and we often can’t agree on the meaning of a document written just two centuries ago. So I won’t even try to wade into the morass of religious debate on the meaning of scripture written 20 centuries ago in an ancient language that we can’t even agree how to properly translate.

Still, “judge not, least ye be judged” seems pretty clear to me.

If folks want to disagree, that’s up to them. But let them do so in their own church, not under the Capitol dome.

Do we really want Congress, itself a perfect symbol for dysfunctional union, deciding the meaning of holy sacraments? Talk about cheapening the institution of marriage. You could find a more meaningful, reverent experience at that Elvis wedding chapel on the Las Vegas Strip.

You know the kind I mean, the ones with the president allegedly refusing to salute the flag or shaking hands with Joseph Stalin as a tyke or some other such foolish fabrication.

Instead of giving myself an ulcer ignoring such things (I don’t suffer fools gladly), I’ve been hitting the “reply all” button and countering these misleading missives with actual facts.

So I’ve been getting fewer and fewer epistles of ignorance as I get dropped from mailing lists. The purveyors of foolish fabrications don’t seem to like actual facts.

But the other day, I received an email entitled “A Very Powerful Cartoon — Please keep it going,” so, OK, I will. At least in this column.

The cartoon depicts a classroom in which the students are standing, hands over their hearts, about to say the Pledge of Allegiance. All except one oafish lout in the front row with his arms crossed and his feet up on his desk.

“Kevin, it’s your right not to stand for the pledge,” the teacher is saying. “But let me introduce to you someone who can’t stand because he was defending that right.”

Next to the teacher is a man in military uniform, and in case anyone misses his sergeant’s stripes, the words “Semper Fi” are written the back of his wheelchair.

OK, I respect and honor the service of soldiers, many of whom have been killed or wounded in defense of American liberties,

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including the right not to say the Pledge of Allegiance. But it also bugs me that the Right has appropriated the pledge as some sort of patriotic shibboleth, allegedly under fire in this country, when in fact the flag salute is alive and well in schools across the nation.What really provoked me to respond, though, was the comment the emailer added below the cartoon:

“Isn’t life strange? I never met one Veteran who enlisted to fight for socialism!”

I’m not sure where the writer was sitting, or standing, in history class, but in fact the Pledge of Allegiance was in fact written by a socialist. Look it up for yourself if you don’t believe me.

Francis Bellamy was a Baptist preacher who believed that the equal distribution of economic resource – in other words, socialism – was inherent in the teachings of Jesus. In 1892, he wrote the pledge as part of a national celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus Day to be recited in schools nationwide.

The pledge, he believed, would function as an important lesson for immigrants and even native-born Americans who might lack sufficient patriotism in the decades after the Civil War. That’s why the pledge is to “one nation, indivisible.” The words “under God” weren’t added until 1954 as an antidote to secular communism.

Those added words were also important to the emailer of the cartoon, who went on to complain that Muslims are allowed to celebrate their religion in public, but that Christians are forbidden the same right.

“It is said that 86 percent of Americans believe in God,” the emailer continues. “Tell me, again, whose country is this? Ours or the Muslims?”

Well, the pledge says “liberty … for all” which I suspect would include Muslims who indeed have the same rights to erect religious displays on private property as do Christians.

Actually, I doubt that the modern secular socialists the emailer refers to and fundamentalist Muslims get along so well, and I suspect that the 86 percent who believe in God includes Muslims. It also includes the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who challenged the Pledge of Allegiance in federal court nearly 75 years ago because they opposed saluting any secular flag on religious grounds.

The case, West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, came to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1943 in the middle of World War II. The Nazis we were fighting at the time were executing Jehovah’s Witnesses for their refusal to salute the swastika, an irony not lost on Justice Robert Jackson, who wrote the court’s opinion.

“Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good, as well as by evil, men,” Jackson wrote. “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”

Jackson went on to say that, “To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous, instead of a compulsory routine, is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.”

That is equally true, I believe, of religious ceremonies. It seems to me, in fact, antithetical to genuine faith, or patriotism, to be bullied into reciting dogma we might not understand or believe in.

Me, I like the Pledge of Allegiance, and always recite it with genuine feeling when asked to do so. That’s because I live in a country where you don’t have to recite the pledge. That’s the liberty the pledge talks about and for which my flag really stands.

You’re also free, of course, to send me cranky, closed-minded emails.

Just don’t blame me if I prefer to fight back with facts.

Marc Charisse is editor of The Evening Sun. Email: mcharisse@eveningsun.com; Twitter: @esmcharisse

Similarly, “Me the People,” by Daily Show writer Kevin Bleyer, is a book on the U.S. Constitution for people unlikely to read books about the U.S. Constitution. With some reservations, I’d even recommend “Me the People” to someone who was planning to read only one book about the Constitution.

Some big reservations, actually, which have to do with Bleyer’s rhetorical and artistic choices. His constitutional law and history jokes might sound funny delivered by Daily Show host Jon Stewart, but Bleyer’s sense of necessary self-deprecation fails him in spots and the humor sometimes comes off as annoyingly self congratulatory.

He starts out by telling his reader he intends to rewrite the Constitution in order to improve upon our founding document. OK, that’s no more than taking Founding Father Thomas Jefferson at his word. The third president, who was in Paris having a good time while Madison and the rest were wrestling with the national charter, believed that the Constitution should automatically expire at the end of 19 years. So by Bleyer’s reckoning, we are already 11 rewrites behind.

Yes, I get that he isn’t serious about rewriting the Constitution, especially when he recasts the preamble in rhyme. But there are times I get the sense he really believes he would be up to such a task and the satire gives way to heavy-handed snarkiness.

At the beginning of the book, Bleyer tells the story of the colonists who stashed their beloved Liberty Bell in manure in order to hide it from the British. The moral, he says, is that sometimes you have to crap on something you love in order to save it. I suspect that’s what he set out to do to, and for, the U.S. Constitution.

But Bleyer’s “rewrites” of constitutional law are the least humorous – or educational – parts of his book. Far better are his depictions of colonial history and constitutional controversies.

The readers learns, for example, of James Madison’s gloomy dullness, the amorous adventures of Gouverneur Morris and just how close the Constitutional Convention came to never finishing the job. All are true, and it’s a lucky stroke – some say the hand of God – that we have any sort of constitution at all to show for the efforts of the framers who met in Philadelphia in the spring and summer of 1787.

In this regard, Bleyer’s book performs a valuable historical service, pulling aside the comforting myths of American history and giving us instead a more unvarnished look at the real work that went into making the Constitution.

Along the way, readers on either side of current historical and constitutional controversies will find reasons to smile in “Me the People.” And hopefully they will recognize some of their own foibles.

Bleyer quotes New York Gov. Silas Wright who all the way back in 1847 wrote “no one familiar with the affairs of our government, can have failed to notice how large a proportion of our statesmen appear never to have read the Constitution of the United States with a careful reference to its precise language and exact provisions, but rather, as occasion presents, seem to exercise their ingenuity … to stretch both to the line of what they, at the moment, consider expedient.”

Those who think of the Constitution as some sort of infallible, divinely inspired writ would benefit the most from reading Bleyer’s book. Perhaps the key to taking the Constitution seriously is learning to laugh a little at one’s own ponderous opinions of its merits and weaknesses.

But for all its mockery, “Me the People” seems to take itself a bit too seriously in places. And it’s hard to tell where the flippant humor ends and the real constitutional history begins.

With all the meanders into modern life and self-references in this rewritten Constitution, the reader is never really sure what to take seriously. Which is a shame, really, because under the snarky comments, there are plenty of serious insights into the fundamental difficulty faced by the framers – to forge a compromise document without compromising the principles that have made our democracy great.

I think they succeeded, but you wouldn’t know it reading much of Bleyer’s book, which, I think, needs more of a rewrite than does our Constitution.

Marc Charisse is editor of The Evening Sun. Email: mcharisse@eveningsun.com; Twitter: @esmcharisse

Well, there is, actually.

“No, no. A law to keep those despicable Westboro folks from protesting at the funerals of fallen soldiers.”

Well there is, actually. In 2006, President George W. Bush signed into law the Respect for America’s Fallen Heroes Act, which forbid protests within 300 of the entrance to a federally administered cemetery within an hour before or after a military funeral. States such as Maryland, where a York County man, Albert Snyder buried his son, Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, have passed similar laws to cover other burial places.

“So why did the Supreme Court say Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist ‘Church’ had a right to protest at Matthew Snyder’s funeral?”

“Well, the court didn’t say that, actually. What Chief Justice John Roberts ruled for the 8-1 majority was that Albert Snyder couldn’t sue Phelps in civil court because the Westboro protesters had complied with applicable laws. They stayed 1,000 feet away and concluded their protest before the funeral began. Albert Snyder testified he couldn’t even see the protesters until later, on television.

“Really? So why do we need another law?”

Good question.

The cynical answer is that the current crop of politicians is so completely incapable of governing that it is all they can do to get together to enact unnecessary legislation that no one can possibly disagree with.

Like the Sanctity of Eternal Rest for Veterans Act signed into law by President Obama earlier this month.

The new law increases buffer spaces between protesters and deceased soldiers’ families to 500 feet, and extends the “quiet time” before and after military funerals to two hours. Civil penalties for violating those rules will also increase significantly.

The new law has been praised by the families of some fallen soldiers, and if it somehow helps salve their incalculable grief, perhaps it has some merit.

But I fail to see how it would have changed the outcome of Snyder v. Phelps a single iota. The protesters were twice the legally required distance from a military funeral and complied with all the instructions of officials at the scene.

Some observers, including the American Civil Liberties Union and Jacob Sullum, a libertarian commentator whose weekly column appears in The Evening Sun, insist the new law is unconstitutional and ultimately will be struck down by the Supreme Court. But that sounds to me like political posturing on the other side of the debate, with no more basis in reality than the need for this new Sanctity of Eternal Rest for Veterans Act.

Since the case involved the subsequent civil liability of protesters who complied with the rules they were given, the constitutionality of the rules themselves were not an issue before the court. But even a cursory reading of Roberts’ opinion in Snyder v. Phelps suggests to me the court would in fact uphold the new law.

“Westboro’s choice of where and when to conduct its picketing is not beyond the Government’s regulatory reach — it is ‘subject to reasonable time, place and manner restrictions’ that are consistent with the standards announced in this Court’s precedents,” Roberts wrote in his opinion.

Under those precedents, a time, place or manner restriction must be content neutral (more or less), be “narrowly tailored” to advance an important governmental interest and allow ample alternative means of communication.

I think the government can meet those standards. The sanctity of military funerals and right of families to be left in peace to bury their dead are of sufficient public interest to warrant restrictions. And demonstrators have ample opportunity before and after funerals, or even during services so long as they stay far enough away, to make their views known.

Roberts implies that content neutrality might be a bit trickier, but notes that the court has already upheld limits on abortion protesters outside clinics. Certainly, it seems to me, limits on demonstrations, whatever their viewpoint, could be upheld as content neutral.

That leaves one important question — the most important question, really:

Why does Westboro’s hateful, nonsensical speech — that God hates homosexuals and that the deaths of Snyder and other soldiers are just punishment for America’s tolerance of gays — deserve First Amendment protection in the first place?

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” Roberts wrote, quoting Texas V. Johnson, the Supreme Court case upholding the right of protesters to burn the American flag. Indeed, the chief justice continued, it is that very speech we find most objectionable that the First Amendment was created to protect.

Speech that offends no one doesn’t need constitutional protection. And the test of our commitment to free speech is our willingness as a society to tolerate expression we find outrageous. To allow private citizens to sue those whose speech they find offensive or hurtful would create a standard so subjective as to silence far more than the Westboro crazies.

Perhaps that is of little comfort to Albert Snyder. But I pray he finds peace in the realization that the cruel kooks of the Westboro Baptist “Church” are the enemies of freedom, and he should pay their pronouncements no more mind than those of, say, the Taliban. And that his son, Matthew Snyder, heroically gave his life for a country that puts the First Amendment at the core of our liberties.

For without the freedom to believe what we will and gather to express those beliefs as we choose, the other liberties enshrined in our Constitution mean very little. To me, there’s no question about that at all.

I don’t have much choice, actually, working as I do in a profession that puts a premium on standing behind what you believe in by putting your name on it. Most newspapers, like The Evening Sun, don’t publish anonymous letters to the editor. And with rare exceptions, we don’t quote anonymous sources in news stories, either.

After all, how much stock should readers put in what you have to say if you aren’t willing to put your name on it? Patriots, I like to say, should be made of sterner stuff.

The trouble with that rhetorical flourish, though, is that the Founding Fathers themselves favored pseudonyms when they wrote the Federalist Papers. So as a student of American history and our Constitution, I have trouble cheering Democratic efforts to require that donors to the so-called super PACs be made public.

Senate Democrats admit their continued late-night “debate” on campaign finance disclosure last week was an exercise in legal futility — designed more to score political points on campaign reform than actually get any new law passed. And indeed, nine votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a Republican filibuster, the measure went down to defeat again Monday night in a vote along strict party lines.

The bill would have required disclosure of donations to political action committees so that voters could see which special interest was paying for what attack ad. Sounds like a worthy endeavor, but on closer examination, maybe the Senate has more pressing things to do with its time right now.

Even if the Democrats were somehow to muster the necessary votes, there’s no guarantee the measure would pass constitutional muster in the Supreme Court. Justice Anthony Kennedy, author of the much-reviled Citizens United decision, has said disclosure, rather than limits on campaign spending, is the best constitutional safeguard against corruption. But there is also a historical and constitutional right to anonymity the justices would have to consider when evaluating any new laws.

When it comes to direct contributions to candidates, the court has upheld both funding limits and financial disclosure. Handing bags of cash to people running for public office raises the real threat of what the court calls “quid pro quo” corruption: I’ll give you X dollars for your vote on Y. The public interest in fair elections in such cases outweighs other considerations, even the First Amendment, the justices have ruled.

But that’s not the case in “indirect” contributions to organizations ostensibly independent from the campaign. Fearing a slippery slope to a tyranny that limits what citizens can spend on political discourse, the court in Citizens United ruled that in the case of “independent” political action committees, money equals speech and limits on speech are unconstitutional.

To me, that makes a certain constitutional sense. I get nervous when I hear politicians, and especially Supreme Court justices, say that is OK to limit the speech of some because it has a disproportionate effect on political campaigns.

That’s exactly what the minority said in Citizens United, and I’m not ready to embrace the political paternalism that we must protect people from political advertising for their own good because they can’t be trusted to figure out who’s telling the truth for themselves. Citizens in a democracy, I think, need to be made of smarter stuff.

Beside, there is good case law out there that suggests there is a right to remain anonymous, one that protects the liberties of us.

In the 1958 case of NAACP v. Alabama, investigators demanded the organization’s membership list, saying they were investigating it for un-American activities. I’d like to think the investigation itself would strike most folks today as un-American, and they’d agree with the court that a political organization could keep its membership list secret in order to keep its members safe from political retribution.

In another case, Talley v. California, the court in 1960 recognized the long history of anonymous discourse in American politics when it recognized a constitutional right to publish anonymous political pamphlets. As much as I distrust anonymous discourse, I trust government less. So I think those fundamental freedoms are at risk when we talk about requiring donors to political action committees be identified.

Besides, it’s a risk we’re being asked to take without much real reward. It’s already a simple enough matter of a google search to find out who is contributing what to which side.

Back in the day of the Federalist Papers, people who paid attention to political discourse had a pretty good idea of the real identities of Publius and Junius. And today it isn’t all that hard to figure out the identities of what Senate majority leader Harry Reid called the “17 angry old white men” who are bankrolling much of the Republican PAC effort.

I think people are smart enough to figure out who’s behind all this negative campaigning on both sides. And if some people don’t want to stand up and stand behind the ads they are paying for, well, as a journalist and a citizen, that tells me about all I need to know right there.

But an excellent reader in The New York Times this morning presents another view: That the court is often less divided, and less ideologically driven, than it sometimes appears, even in many significant cases. And that despite President Obama’s appointments, we can expect continued conflict between the court and the administration. Click here to read the article.

Supporters of President Barack Obama's health care law celebrate outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Thursday, June 28, 2012, after the court's ruling was announced. AP Photo/David Goldman)

OK, I was wrong about the Supreme Court’s vote on health care. For months, I’ve been confidently predicting a 6-3 vote upholding the law.

But I was right on about Chief Justice John Roberts, who I insisted would do the right thing — constitutionally speaking — and vote to uphold the power of a democratically elected Congress to enact national health-care legislation.

So pardon me while I bask in the unaccustomed light of being right about something for a change. A lawyer friend has even taken to calling me the Great Prognosticator in light of my seeming clairvoyance regarding the chief justice.

Actually, like the famous fortune tellers of old, from Sybil to Miss Cleo, I figured you have to go on the record with a guess now and again. If you’re right, you can tout your success, as I’m doing here. And if you’re wrong, who’s to remember? Not that long ago, I confidently predicted Martina Navratilova would win the Mirror Ball on “Dancing with the Stars.” (I thought she was Russian.) So of course I stopped blogging about the show when she was the first contestant voted off.

For good or ill, though, we’re stuck with Roberts, since we can’t vote people off the Supreme Court, despite the fulminations of some conservative commentators outraged by the chief justice’s vote. The conventional wisdom is that the court’s decision is a legal victory for Obama and a political win for Romney, since it gives the Republican something else to run against. But I think the decision is a victory for the court itself, or at least for Roberts, who proved himself to be the thoughtful, intellectually honest jurist I hoped he was.

When Roberts was nominated to the court in 2005, I remember Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe being interviewed on television. Tribe is considered one of the most liberal legal thinkers around, far too liberal to ever be nominated to the Supreme Court himself. So the interviewer was clearly expecting fireworks.

But Tribe wouldn’t bite. He insisted Roberts was a first-rate scholar and an honest arbiter of the Constitution, even if they didn’t always see eye to eye on that document’s meaning. He flattered himself to consider Roberts his friend, he said, and predicted he would make a first-rate justice. I figured if a lefty like Larry Tribe liked the guy despite his conservative views, he had to be first-rate.

Roberts’ first term, though, gave a lot a people pause, and in his otherwise fair and highly-readable book, “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court,” Jeffrey Toobin depicts Roberts as a conservative ideologue determined to undo decades of good law since the New Deal.

Since that first term, though, Roberts has seemed increasingly centrist, to me, if not to Toobin, who penned his own I-got-it-wrong in light of Roberts’ vote. Certainly, the court can have that effect on people: Given the awesome responsibility of being the final arbiter of American law tends to make the justices more careful and conservative, in the real meaning of that word, and less likely to be swayed by ideological predilections. That’s why it is so famously hard to predict how justices will vote once they get a seat on the Supreme Court.

And Roberts’ vote the other day on immigration, upholding the notion that federal action trumped state law, marked him in my book as a real jurist rather than a political hack. That federalism question, after all, was supposed to have been settled by the Civil War.

And in the health care case, Roberts’ opinion for the narrow 5-4 majority assumes what I think is a similarly settled question — that Congress’ power to tax allows for what’s called the health-care mandate. The politicians who passed the law didn’t want to call it a tax, but that’s exactly what it is.

“Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness,” Roberts wrote.

So Roberts’ opinion doesn’t mean the government can make you eat broccoli or create death panels or anything else. It just means the government can tax you if you don’t have health insurance, and that’s hardly a novel notion in the law, whatever the far right wants to pretend.

And whatever else gets said about him this week, the chief justice took the truly conservative position that to have overturned the law would be to legislate from bench, no matter whose ox is being gored. If people don’t like the health care law, let them elect people who will repeal it. That’s not the job of unelected judges, conservatives are quick to remind us when it is laws they like that are at stake.

I know that ugly politics play a role on the bench, but I like to think that sometimes, at least, the law stands for more than the political preferences of the party with the most judicial appointees. That’s the kind of courts they have in other countries less free than ours — the kind that rubber stamp whatever the ruling party wants.

Real democracies might be a bit more messy. But they trust the people, not the judges to clean things up. Personally, I’m not enamoured of the new health care law. It’s too early to tell, I’m told, but in the short run at least, my health care insurance has only gone up.

But Roberts’ principled opinion makes me want to dance, and makes him, in my book, a real star.

But the weekly lunches at the Reader’s Cafe are really civil discussions of law, local politics, the newspaper business and a lot of other things. A chance for me to meet any readers who care to drop by and talk about what they want to talk about.

But last Tuesday, observed one regular attendee, we had our first knock-down, drag-out constitutional-law debate. Or rather, the Democrats in the group gave me the verbal cowhiding they thought I so richly deserved for my support of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United.

In 2010, the court in that 5-4 decision struck down political spending limits for individuals, corporations, unions and advocacy groups — the so-called super-PACs of modern American political discourse.

It’s become an article of faith on the left that the trials and tribulations of the republic can be pinned on that single Supreme Court decision. And now that conservative hero-governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin has survived recall, the chorus of condemnation has swelled yet again against the corporations and the super-PACs the Democrats like to blame for their political woes.

I’m no major fan of either corporations or super-PACs, but I have to admit I got a little strident myself at lunch last Tuesday. I probably looked more more like the crazed black-and-white speaker in one of those grainy
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PAC ads myself than the thoughtful scholar/editor I like to think I am.

But while well-meaning people on both sides of the political divide should be rightfully concerned about the corrupting influences of corporate campaign spending, the Democratic rhetorical response, I believe, is short-sighted, hypocritical and ultimately undermines democracy and free speech.

The opponents of Citizens United are saying, in effect, that the other side’s campaign ads are too effective and must therefore be silenced. That’s censorship of the rawest kind, limiting speech based on the identity of the speaker, an idea offensive to the First Amendment. The fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones, the great Justice Louis Brandeis wrote nearly a century ago, “not enforced silence.”

We’ve long been told we have to protect bad speech like pornography and depictions of gratuitous violence to protect speech that really matters. So as much as the left doesn’t like the speech of corporations, I’m not prepared to silence groups ranging from the NEA to the NRA to the NAACP just because the Koch brothers want to support the Tea parties.

Especially when the Democrats, from Obama on down, have plenty of their own PAC money to fund their own good counsels. (Or their own sleazy attack ads, depending on your political perspective.)

Even before the votes were finally counted in Wisconsin the other day, Democrats were complaining that PAC money had cost them the election. They claimed they’d been outspent 8-1 in the recall, but that’s only true if you compare the spending of the candidates themselves. Because of a loophole in Wisconsin campaigning finance law, the candidate facing recall was able to directly accept much larger campaign contributions.

What those scary figures don’t include is nearly $14 million in outside spending by pro-Democrat groups, including national teacher and government-workers unions. Nor does it count the millions spent by the unions to launch the recall in the first place.

Yes, close to two-thirds of the outside money favored Walker, but the fact is, so did many voters.

Polls showed a majority of Wisconsin voters were opposed to recall on principle, whatever their political leanings. And the surveys indicated most had already made up their minds on the issue before the PAC ads were in full swing.

As long as the Democrats think their main problem is that their enemies talk too much, it distracts them from their own real challenges — a shortage of candidates who appeal to working stiffs or the ability to articulate a vision we can all get behind. There are a lot of Americans out there who agree with the Tea parties; pretending they are a corporate fiction isn’t going to win the Democrats many elections.

Ultimately, though, what I find so distasteful about all the hand-wringing over Citizens United is the unflattering assumption it makes about American voters. It says we are silly people incapable of evaluating what we hear, swayed by whichever side spends the most money.

For a bunch of Democrats, that doesn’t sound very democratic. Isn’t the whole idea of democracy that people are capable of deciding for themselves who has the best, if not the most expensive argument?

We all like to think we’re smarter than that, just not the guy on the other side of the aisle who happens to disagree with us.

Agree or disagree, join us for lunch next Tuesday. And don’t be afraid to speak up.

Like I say, more speech is always better than less, but I suspect some of the lunch crowd is tired of hearing me do most of the talking.

Marc Charisse is editor of The Evening Sun. Email: mcharisse@eveningsun.com; Twitter: @esmcharisse

IF YOU GO

Evening Sun editor Marc Charisse meets interested readers for lunch and discussion at 1 p.m. Tuesdays at the Reader’s Cafe, 125 Broadway, near the Hanover square. All are welcome.