Emancipation of slaves. Women's suffrage. Civil rights. Freedom to worship, ignore or denigrate God. Welcome to America, where freedom flourishes under the First Amendment — a law under attack.

As the White House website explains, the First Amendment provides that Congress "make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise. It protects freedom of speech, the press, assembly ..."

The 14th Amendment extends that limitation to state, regional and local governments. That's why law enforcement cannot raid a newspaper and the publisher's home because they don't like what the paper might print. Obtaining a warrant to lawfully raid a media organization should be difficult — like moving Pikes Peak to New Jersey in a U-Haul.

The police of Marion, Kan., somehow obtained a warrant to search the Marion County Record, seizing computers and cellphones. In the same operation, they raided the home of a local councilwoman. They searched the home of the publication's 98-year-old co-owner who died the next day (The Record blames the stress of the raid).

It came as a reporter researched alleged sexual misconduct by the Marion chief when he worked as a Kansas City cop. The chief and four officers conducted the raids after a local restaurateur complained of a reporter trying to obtain a sealed DUI case.

Reporters seek truth. They routinely obtain documents the government thinks they should not have.

If reporters, bloggers and sleuths cannot do this, we won't be free. Given permission, politicians would use the justice system to keep the masses in the dark. Innocents would fester in prisons for their words or values. Corruption flourishes in darkness and information sheds light.

Forcefully taking a publication's information before a story prints smacks of attempted prior restraint, illegal in nearly all circumstances. After the raid, a local prosecutor found no evidence of a crime and ordered the property returned.

The raid has drawn bold condemnation from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, The Washington Post and dozens of other media organizations. The Society for Professional Journalists offered to pay the Record's legal bills.

The raid "goes directly against the First Amendment rights that our country holds in esteem," said Dean Ridings, CEO of America's Newspapers.

This case should worry all Americans. Sadly, it represents merely one of too many 21st century attacks on the First Amendment. The law expressly protects "the people" and two institutions: religion and the press.

Look no further than Colorado to find institutionalized and ongoing assaults on the First Amendment.

The state's legally challenged "Civil Rights Commission" wants to force artists to express anything a consumer demands with no regard for the artist's religious or deeply held convictions. By the commission's illegal approach, it should force a lifelong atheist to paint Jesus with reverence — a violation of free speech and religious liberty.

Just as authorities can't control the content of a newspaper or the writings of a desktop pamphleteer, it cannot tell artists what to create. The Supreme Court has slapped the commission with two First Amendment rulings, but commissioners don't get it.

If we accept assaults on the First Amendment, we weaken liberty and invite oppression. We normalize authorities trying to regulate words and beliefs. That's why what's the matter in Kansas concerns us all.

The Gazette Editorial Board

REPRINTED FROM THE COLORADO SPRINGS GAZETTE

Photo credit: Felicia Buitenwerf at Unsplash