In the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling, conservative pundits are invoking the Founding Fathers, claiming that the First Amendment has been protected. Now political ads financed by America's largest companies can proliferate in the marketplace of ideas.

The "marketplace of ideas" metaphor is a revealing one. A market, after all, is where people go to be consumers. And yet the right the Founders enshrined in the First Amendment was quite different: it was the right to produce speech, not consume it. They envisioned individual citizens as active vendors in the market of political ideas, not as passive consumers of corporate propaganda.

The pundits have declared the court's ruling a blow against tyranny. But surely there is no sleeker highway to tyranny than a society in which an entity that has neither brain to think, nor heart to feel, nor body to sacrifice on behalf of its country - a corporation - is accorded the same rights as an individual who does.

By unleashing the "speech" of corporations, the court has undermined our right to speak. Its practical effect will be akin to that of a jet engine's on a conversation between two soft-spoken people on the runway.

Yes, conservatives: this decision does involve the Founders. It's making them roll over in their graves.

MICHAEL BROWN, ROCHESTER