Open letter to Minister @MinAMendonca, Dear Minister, From the reports I receive, the video below, authored by me, has been censored. Whether by your order or by the platforms to which you handed the scissors to erase, on their own and without a new court order, any "equivalent narrative." This has a name: prior censorship. The Constitution prohibits it twice, in Article 5, IX, and in Article 220, § 2, which forbids "any and all censorship of a political, ideological, or artistic nature." You know this. It seems you have chosen to forget. You also forgot the rules of the court you currently vice-preside. TSE Resolution 23.610/2019 states that the Electoral Justice's actions regarding online content should have the least possible interference in the democratic debate (Article 38) and requires, under penalty of nullity, the indication of the specific URL of each removed content (Article 38, § 4). The Civil Framework of the Internet follows the same logic (Article 19, § 1). A generic order that transfers to a private company the judgment of what is "equivalent" is not jurisdictional oversight. It is outsourcing the gag. All excerpts of my video were extracted from reports and presented in the context in which they were said. There is no electoral or criminal wrongdoing there. There are facts of public notoriety. I ask, then: what exactly troubled you? Was it witnessing evangelical authorities offending ecclesiastical authorities and Catholic symbols? Was it bad for the denomination of which you are a pastor? Did a project not exist that altered Law 6.802/1980 to turn the Patroness of Brazil into merely the patroness of Roman Catholic apostolics? Does Flávio not say, in an excerpt of the video below, that the first thing he will do if elected is to "consecrate Brazil to Our Lord Jesus Christ"? In a State that Article 19, I, of the Constitution declares secular, the promise is already debatable. Criticizing it is a civic duty. Did that evangelical deputy in the video not call the archbishop and the pope "bums"? Did that pastor from Bastos (SP) not refer to the Patroness as "the devil disguised in blue"? Is it not a fabrication the video of bolsonaristas causing chaos and trying to assault employees of TV Aparecida on the day of the Patroness? Is it a lie the text reproduced below from one who the press points out as Flávio’s pastor, calling the congregation to undermine the authority of the Patroness? In light of this body of evidence, is it a crime to ask if Flávio will do what he himself promises in the video below, something many Brazilians would understand as a belittlement of the Patroness? The Court you are part of has already answered that it is not. In ADPF 130, it dismissed any prior state control over what can be said. In ADI 4451, it guaranteed the right to criticize and satirize candidates during the campaign. And a candidate recognizing themselves in a criticism does not turn the criticism into a lie. It turns it, at most, into a diagnosis. Does it not seem to you that you have gone far beyond the powers of a judge, which are not those of a pastor, nor of God, by ordering the posts that only said "Our Lady Aparecida, pray for us" to be removed? Two thousand years ago, someone already separated the jurisdictions: "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's." You know the verse better than I do (I think). It seems you have confused the counters. Voltaire wrote the Treatise on Tolerance after a Catholic court in Toulouse ordered the execution of a Protestant, Jean Calas. History has a sense of humor: now it is a Protestant judge who orders the erasure of Catholic prayers. The same Voltaire taught that fanaticism is to superstition what delirium is to fever. Montesquieu warned that every man who holds power tends to abuse it, and goes as far as he finds limits. You can do much. You cannot do everything. I trust that your peers will overturn these authoritarian and absurd decisions, made at the request of Flávio, the son of man. The man who appointed you to the Court. Reflect, Minister. We do not live in a holy war, although perhaps there is one in your mind. I will not be intimidated. (translated)
