Freedom for real...

This is a RE-POST from a friend who just moved to Portugal to be with his soon to be wife...

Sic Semper Tyrannis!
Category: Life

So many of you have probably heard of the tyranny of European bureaucrats. The horror stories that come out of Italy are particularly severe, but now I have my own. On two occassions - trying to get my tax number and trying to file my wedding documents - I have basically been told by a bureaucrat to buzz off and failed. On both occassions, going to a different bureaucrat on a different day completely solved the problem and everything was fine. I was stymied by either pure ignorance, pure capriciousness, or both.

Actually, the tax business was likely ignorance. In the case of the wedding documents, I think the clerk was upset we made her work at 9am. You know, when her office opened.

I also recently discovered that apparently Freedom of Speech in this country does not extend to being a jerk. Insulting people verbally is a crime, complete with stiff penalties like going to jail, unless you can prove the insult is true. Imagine if calling a guy who cut out off in the sidewalk a disease ridden c*ckbite was treated as a case of slander. This all came up because of my "George W. Bush is a Punk Ass Chimp" shirt, which would get me up to 3 years for insulting a foreign dignitary.

Now, most of us are Americans. We were all raised with the notion that saying anything to anyone anywhere is our God-given Constitutional right. It is discovering that this sort of thing is not protected in Europe that makes me proud to be an American. We really are a freer people, in certain unique ways. You might lose your job or getting slugged for being a jackass, but in America, you do NOT go to jail for it.