Retired basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar thinks “lying campaign ads” should be illegal and the politicians who make them should be arrested (in other words, probably every politician ever.)
Abdul-Jabbar penned a passionate editorial in Time titled, “American Politicians Are A Greater Threat to Democracy Than ISIS,” in which he claims that false campaign ads and voter ID laws are about to end democracy as we know it.
Abdul-Jabbar’s editorial is full of imaginative imagery, like how election days should be, to the rest of the world “The aromatic sizzle that sells the hearty steak” rather than “the aggressive perfume sprayers in department stores that deaden your senses with a cloud of acrid stench leaving you blinded and dazed.” Or how politicians are “brutally clubbing the baby seal of the democratic principle.”
Abdul-Jabbar laments that “only sixteen states” criminalize “false political statements,” while Ohio recently declared one of these laws unconstitutional after a legal brawl between a Democratic politician and pro-life group the Susan B. Anthony list.
But as the Susan B. Anthony list case demonstrated, “false” political speech has a lot of definitions, depending on who’s doing the speaking.
The Susan B. Anthony List had bought billboards claiming that then-Rep. Steven Driehaus (D-Ohio) had voted for taxpayer-funded abortion, referring to his vote for Obamacare. Driehaus and pro-life groups continue to disagree as to whether a vote for Obamacare constitutes a vote “for” taxpayer-funded abortion.
And contra Abdul-Jabbar, Ohio’s court ruled that curbing political free speech, not political lies, is the greater threat to democracy.
U.S. District Court judge Timothy Black wrote at the time: “We do not want the government (i.e., the Ohio Elections Commission) deciding what is political truth – for fear that the government might persecute those who criticize it. Instead, in a democracy, the voters should decide.”
He even threw in a House of Cards reference: “There’s no better way to overpower a trickle of doubt than with a flood of naked truth.”
Abdul-Jabbar, meanwhile, wants political speech to be regulated by the courts and punished with “huge fines capable of crippling a campaign” or prison time.
