Health Care and Social Behavior

There is a form of social behavior which crops up now and then that strikes me as a distant relative of old fashioned lynching. It is the mob action of depriving a person or persons of their civil right of free speech by shouting them down whenever they try to speak. It has been employed at both ends of the political spectrum, for example, (on the Left?) at universities when possibly racist conclusions were being derived from IQ testing and very recently in the severe disruption of town hall meetings on health care (on the right?) throughout the country.

I'm sure this is a very old tactic and it has probably been employed by a wide variety of thuggish political causes whenever they thought it would pay. My concern is not with the specifics of the causes but with the employment of this tactic. Whether the cause is a commonly accepted element of the local culture, as was the case in lynchings, or a more special interest, as in the case of preventing the reform of health care, which is a matter of really BIG bucks, it strikes me as very anti-democratic and profoundly un-American in character.

Such things happen but I did not serve in WWII to just sit back let such things happen in my own country without protest. I regard such behavior as certainly a form of disorderly conduct but also mob action to deprive our fellow citizens of their civil rights, and, if they are shown to be organized, a conspiracy to do so.

I confess that I am just a centrist, not a Republican. I would like to hear more from the right on this matter.