Thank you Bob for sharing this, and all of you who participated.

Man I need to visit New York again. That would have been an awsome family event.

It truly is a shame that I don’t live in New York, because I would have so much fun with these people. You’ll see me in Union Square one of these days, Bob!

Anyway, that girl is wrong. The one being hateful was not the kids making fun of him, but the preacher, himself. He’s the one who believes and teaches that humans are so evil that they all deserve to suffer and burn and scream and scorch for all eternity. Is this not a hateful and inhumane thing to teach one’s children? If God created humans, then he is the one to blame if we are evil, for he created us all with the capacity to sin. Do we blame the car if gets recalled for a manufacturer’s defect?

The idea of Free Speech is confusing to so many people, because they think that Law=Morality. They think that because the constitution says that the government cannot come in and stop you from expressing yourself (yeah, we’ve heard that before), that individuals have to let people talk, too.

Nope. Not how it works. The first amendment is to protect us from government thugs. Communities and individuals can actually–wait for it–refuse to listen to crap. Otherwise, the freedom to speak would just be a huge contradiction–much like the idea that you can’t criticize religion. That’s a contradiction because converting to a new religion or deconverting is exactly that–the ultimate criticism of religion.

Free Hugs is completely and absolutely counter to what the street preacher is saying, believe it or not. You give free hugs completely voluntarily, not because a big monster in the sky is holding a gun to your head.

Again, people think the the government gives us rights. It doesn’t. We have to put walls up to keep it’s grubby hands away.

That is beautiful, Bob! This is absolutely why I love free speech. No one was removing him from the area, they were just mocking him. Anybody who thinks that “we did not come from monkeys, from apes” is an argument against evolution/for the Bible deserves to be ridiculed relentlessly.