“Only a weak society needs government protection or intervention before it pursues its resolve to preserve the truth,” Kennedy wrote. A government database of all medal winners doesn’t exist, though there is a Medal of Honor database. The ruling went on to suggest a less severe way to deal with those who lie about military glory: create a database that could be used to verify claims. “That governmental power has no clear limiting principle.” “Permitting the government to decree this speech to be a criminal offense, whether shouted from the rooftops or made in a barely audible whisper, would endorse government authority to compile a list of subjects about which false statements are punishable,” Kennedy wrote. The court’s majority opinion was that the law punishing the liars was more damaging than the lies. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the dissenting opinion, the law was “enacted to stem an epidemic of false claims about military decorations” that “were undermining our country’s system of military honors and inflicting real harm on actual medal recipients and their families.” The ruling is one of several recent Supreme Court rulings dealing with the First Amendment that would seem to go against public sentiment. Kennedy wrote for the majority, “Lying was his habit.” The 6-3 ruling came in a case involving Xavier Alvarez, a former local elected official who at a 2007 water board meeting in Southern California falsely claimed that he had served as a Marine and received a Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration. In fact, the justices ruled that many lies are protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a federal law that makes it a crime to lie about being a military hero.
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