Daily Journal:

As we all know, the idiom “freedom of speech” denotes a constitutional order in which any public organization (if its activities are not prohibited by a court decision) has an unconditional and unrestricted right (except for the laws of nature and purely technical factors) to form its own corporate point views on certain topical issues, and then publicly express and defend it. The church (umma, sangha - underline as necessary) has this right to exactly the same extent as any trade union or political party.

Moreover, in the context of a long-term and sluggish social transformation that our country has been experiencing for a decade now, replenishing legislation and legal proceedings with moral judgments, as, for example, the “media community” regularly does, as well as each of us in our kitchen (or wherever where the notorious consensus is now being formed), remains a fairly natural strategy for a church or other mass religious organization, which can well be used far beyond the boundaries of the notorious “church fence”, in politics or economics to exactly the same extent as in private life.

However, the replacement of institutional judicial power with self-appointed public councils is an extraordinary and quite dangerous measure, which once destroyed not only the Russian, but also the French, and even earlier (though not forever) the British monarchy, in particular - from this type of practice, appropriate only in conditions of a large-scale economic, political or man-made disaster (which, strictly speaking, is a revolution), the notorious “power of the councils” once grew; I hope this is not what the authors of the initiative discussed here had in mind.