Mehros Nassersharifi is being charged with making “a telecommunication” “with purpose to harass, intimidate, or abuse a person at the premises to which the telecommunication was made” (Ohio Rev. Code § 2917.21(A)(1)), by
creat[ing] a Twitter account named “Perrysburg Girls Ranked” and post[ing] numerous girls names which contained descriptions of their physical attributes in a derogatory and abusive manner, including a derogatory and abusive manner, including a derogatory post about a female of Jewish ethnicity.
The Twitter account apparently had at least 15 posts, which
contained female student’s names, with a number beside them, and a description of them.
Many of the posts contained derogatory, harassing and abusive descriptions of their physical attributes. One of the posts contained a derogatory description of a female of Jewish ethnicity. The post read, “The Jew. Other than the fact that she should have been perished along with the 6 million back In the 1940’s, she’s annoying as hell, she has a weird chunky body. NO ass, no tits, and an ugly fucked up face. Jumps from guy to guy, and no real positives to dating her. I came daddy brings her to a 61.”
Now this is obviously nasty behavior. While I think that even it is constitutionally protected (there’s no established First Amendment exception that covers it), I have to agree that little would be lost to public debate if people couldn’t publicly insult high school students’ appearance, and say that they ought to have been killed.
But nothing in the statute that the prosecutor is using is limited to such speech. Instead, the statute applies to a vast range of speech—at least if one accepts the prosecutor’s theory that a Twitter message is “made … to” “the premises” of everyone who might read it:
(A) No person shall knowingly make or cause to be made a telecommunication, or knowingly permit a telecommunication to be made from a telecommunications device under the person’s control, to another, if the caller does any of the following:
(1) Makes the telecommunication with purpose to harass, intimidate, or abuse any person at the premises to which the telecommunication is made, whether or not actual communication takes place between the caller and a recipient; …
This is WHY conservatives and all decent people must defend moral ethics in America. If your “truth” is truth, and my “truth” is truth, we’re kinda stuck in this no man’s land of moral relativity when, in fact, one of us is clearly wrong. A sage man I once worked for frequently stated, “You can’t legislate morality.” This is a fine example of that.
The lack of a moral baseline in a culture — whether everyone adheres to it or not — results in a twisted accommodation for every immoral writing and utterance when, instead, the perpetrator should feel enormous shame for being caught in the act of such things.
This is what Franklin was talking about when he said, “A Republic if you can keep it.” Among other things, his remark assumed we, as a nation, would remain virtuous enough to make self-governance work. But if you look at the sheer number of laws on the books today, it’s obvious we are not virtuous enough to “keep it.”
Similarly, our second president wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Here’s the deal: If increasingly stringent gun laws can’t stop immoral people from using them to commit crimes, what makes anyone think immoral people won’t abuse social media to defame and threaten others? All these laws do is make criminals out of decent people who grow increasingly paranoid about saying the “wrong” thing as determined by a non-elected state bureaucrat.
In a simpler time, when men were men, the brothers of these girls would just beat the shit out of the perverted immigrant. Of course, in a simpler time we didn’t have Facebook, Twitter, or 100 million immigrants from shithole countries running around the USA.
…and I meant to add this to Franklin’s reply: Our founders knew exactly what would happen to this nation if people couldn’t behave morally. They knew that men/humans would take up the mantle of Nature and Nature’s God and mete out the Pharisaical “laws” by which to live. And that’s precisely where we are today; everyone bleating about “rights” and no one talking about our obligations of moral decency or, Heaven help us!, virtuousness. We’re apparently too sophisticated to be bound by such quaint ideas. Freedom comes at a price but there is a long chain of abuses to it that forge the link to war.
Public persons have a higher standard for defamation than private children.
This grading of your classmates is actually how Zuckerburg got his start before Facebook.
The publishing of this information with the intent to harass and bully the underage is the distinction. Private communications are free to say almost whatever. But the laws have not caught up with social media.
And if out crop of Congressional dumbassescan’t articulate a responsible and flexible solutiin, they’ll punt to some global body that will outlaw criticizing them, China or Islam.
@AbigailAdams – You are my new favorite person. You write beautifully, lucidly, and correctly. This nation needs many, many more like you.
Well done.
Aren’t there laws agains’t death threats already?
Instead of wishing she perished with the 6 million other jews, she shoulda said something about an after third term abortion.
He’s just an excitable Boy.
F4UCorsair — (I’m blushing at your praise, kind friend.)
And you’re no slouch when it comes to writing, so your compliment means a lot. Do you see a blog in my future? lol