libel

Thankfully, Bohmermann didn’t suffer the same fate as one Mike Ward.

It’s hard to not take freedom of speech for granted in the U.S. You can pretty much speak freely here, especially when you compare our free speech laws to those around the world. If you don’t look at what those laws are and how they’re enforced elsewhere, saying what you want in the good ol’ U.S. of A is just assumed to be the norm. 

In this particular case, German comedian Jan Bohmermann presented a satirical poem on television suggesting that the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sex with goats.The Turkish government did not take to those remarks kindly and brought Bohmermann up on charges of an old German law that prohibits insults of foreign government representatives. Luckily, the court taking on the case concluded that it was a joke, shouldn’t be taken seriously, and didn’t find Bohmermann guilty of the charges levied against him. 

Though the case was dropped, let this be one of the thousands of cautionary tales of a potential Trump presidency. Already, Trump has said he’d open up libel laws so it would be easier to sue members of the press that he thought were making up stories about him and even briefly had a filed lawsuit against Bill Maher for a joke that speculated about Trump’s mother having sex with an orangutan. 

If you care about free speech and comedy, you might want to make sure the much more despicable version of Biff Tannen doesn’t win next month.