I worry, though - if we’re to deface billboards, why stop there? I mean, I’ve long had worries that we might be morally obliged not to stop there.

But it seems that vigilante justice is only successful, so to speak, when government is comparatively weak and/or the populace is overwhelming in support of the measure. Or when it’s possible to carry it out without detection - as in the case of taking the posters down. If taking abortion clinics down could be accomplished with similar ease and with little fear of reprisal, would we not do it?

As to the practical point about not regulating speech - I like what you had to say. But I don’t see that the government would be straining at a gnat if we were to add (at the least) pornography to the list of restricted speech.

I think that too often, these issues have gotten out of local folks’ hands. If people were allowed to vote on whether they would tolerate the sale of pornography in their town, for example, in a kind of referendum, I suspect that there would be a whole lot of places with more restricted “free speech.”