Mike Tomasky is correct--Miss California doesn't understand the Bill of Rights. But I guess she understands right-wing politics. Give it time, and she might well become the next...Joe the Plumber.
The point of the First Amendment isn't to give any old loudmouth a platform from which to launch unopposed, offensive diatribes. It's part of a compact between the public and the government in which the government agrees not to stop you from speaking your mind, unless you are inciting a riot, yelling fire in a crowded theater, etc. Miss California had every right to say what she felt in a public place about gay marriage, but she has no right not to expect to be criticized for it. That's not a free speech issue. You take a public stance that's controversial, you have to be prepared to defend it. That's how it works.
I have noticed that the right has tended to move toward a rather bizarre view of free speech over the past few years. There's this incident. After Prop 8 passed, opponents posted a map of the initiative's supporters, which caused Rod Dreher to freak out. The best was this one: Sarah Palin loses an election and goes on to insist that reporters that published work critical of her are violating, in some fashion, her rights to free speech. What one sees in these examples is evidence of a larger pattern: the right sees free speech as a sort of guarantee to avoid being criticized for their views. Rather than a guarantee to say what they want, they see free speech as being a guarantee to say what they want and that any opposition to that is un-Constitutional. Neat trick. We liberals should have thought of that when we created political correctness, Frankenstein style, in a tiny hut outside Springfield, Mass.
This is all pretty clearly absurd for a movement that insists on an originalist interpretation of the framers as a guiding principle to Constitutional Law. But it indicates one of two possibilities: either they feel entitled to preferential (indeed, deferential) treatment because of the timeless and unquestioned strength of their ideas, or they don't feel that their views can sustain harsh criticism and scrutiny. But the ultimate conclusion is that conservatism has crystallized into dogma, which is not exactly a new insight to make, but this is just one aspect in which it is being manifested.
