By that logic, the government could arrest people for having books by foreign authors in their homes, without in any way encroaching on their First Amendment rights. They’re not being arrested for anything they said, after all, so the Constitution is irrelevant.

I do however imagine that judges might interpret the definition of “freedom of speech” as necessarily implying the right to be heard, while still not granting a right to hear others’ speech. But I have no idea.

Don’t, by the way, assume that I think keeping him out is good policy. I don’t. Plenty of bad policies are constitutional.

Suppose they start running powerful noise generators on Al-Jazeera’s and BBC’s frequencies.

Would that, in your opinion, interfere with the free speech rights of Americans?

My point is simply that long delays in visa processing are not nearly so unusual as you portray them. Visa processing can be fast for a very restricted range of non-contraversial cases, (Tourist visas from western democracies, say.) Visas for employment are not among them.

Abb1, keeping him out may be dubious as a policy matter, but from a First amendment standpoint, keeping him out in no way whatsoever interferes with the free speech rights of Americans. I expect this ruling to be overturned.

Which I personally have no problem with – the idea that written words in some way constrain the actions of people who claim to be believe in them is one of the commoner fallacies.

Yes, but in Ramadan’s case, he was supposed to teach a class in the US, at the university of Notre Dame. That’s hard to do over the phone. Of course I don’t mean just a private conversation – athough having a private invitation does, in fact, help a lot if you’re applying for a visa.

I’ve seen a number of visitor visas turned down even when invited by prestigious universities way before 9/11. Commies, ya know. Remember them?

I think that argument lost what little force it might have had the day they invented the telephone. By now, I can hear what an alien says on the other side of the planet better than I can hear an American on the other side of the room.

And that was very little force indeed, because the dude’s absence from this country isn’t stopping you from saying anything, so excluding him had precisely zero impact on any American’s freedom of speech.

“Visa applications normally take 2 days, 30 in complex cases,”

LOL! On what planet? I’m in the process of helping my finacee enter the country so that we can get married, and I assure you the INS can kill a month just getting around to telling you that they raised the application fee after you mailed the forms, so do it all over again with a bigger check. We’ve been at this since last year, and if there are no more hitches, she gets interviewed in another two months.

Two days… what a fantasy that is!

Actually, I was trying to draw attention to this piece (via Daniel Drezner’s site), which—in case my link fails again—is at christianitytoday.com, and which uses CT for to both praise and decry the blogosphere.