Court: 1st Amendment protects blogging about divorce details

A Vermont family court has mostly reversed an order that censored a man's blog postings complaining about his wife's conduct in their divorce. The order had banned "all postings about plaintiff [wife] and issues in the parties' marriage."

Like it or not, government, in the form of family law and family courts, is deeply involved in families' lives. And therefore many people's complaints about what happens in their divorces are conceived as political complaints, of general public interest, and not just as private matters. Americans think they have a right to tell other Americans what their government is doing in their family; what unjust behavior by other family members government has tolerated or enabled; and what unimagined, un-American horrors might be visited on any of us.

People who do this usually do further harm to themselves and their families. They either were kind of weird all along or the things that are happening to them are making them a little crazy. Or completely crazy. But complaining to the general public about the government's mistreatment of you is what America is all about, and it's at the core of our Constitution.

And our family court system will only decrease its ability to understand and reform itself if it censors information and complaints about family law cases.

The earlier order is part of a disturbing trend of judges censoring people who complain publicly about court cases. Here in Virginia,  judges tried  to  have the bar discipline a prosecutor who accused them of ignoring the law in their handling of certain criminal cases. It's funny how people with considerable training in the Constitution sometimes see an exception to free speech rights where others see the kind of speech that the Founders were most interested in protecting.