FREEDOM OF SPEECH
PART ONE
The First Amendment to the Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
For the people to rule wisely, they must be free to think and speak without fear of reprisal.
In light of the fractiousness of the country, it’s tantalizing to question the practicality of free speech. Only in the United States is speech as free as it can possibly be. It’s not entirely free in Europe where certain views are prohibited from public expression, yet they seem to have well-functioning democracies.
We view freedom of speech as a self-evident right, not needing explanation. If it is an obvious and absolute right, aren’t we recognizing also that same right for the fringes of our society, both left and right, to utter their most vile thoughts? Why do we hold that absolute view? Wouldn’t it be far better to suffuse the First Amendment with a dismissal of the fringes?
We do restrict other rights for the sake of the public welfare. Most of them can be taken away with “due process”, and so often that is governed by the political, social, and economic conditions of the day.
Why can we not do that with free speech?
In the 21st Century view, and if you will, the “Woke” view, liberty means the government provides for an established standard for the exercise of rights. The republican presumption of liberty differs. In a free republic, the people are governed by laws they themselves create, therefore freedom of speech must remain as absolute. The only constraints to free speech are libel and defamation.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion about the things they read, watch, listen to, or whatever, and they have the right to express them orally, in print, and even online. Often enough those opinions will be ones you don’t agree with. Sometimes they won’t be nice. Sometimes they will offend you, sometimes the people expressing them will be arseholes. It’s not even a responsibility to express thoughts in a kind and genteel manner.
“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.” Justice William O. Douglas
The claim that “hate speech” is not free speech suggests that we can create classes of speech. What is “hate speech”? The simple denotation of hate speech is that which is intended to insult, offend, or intimidate a person because of some trait such as religion, race, sexual, orientation, national origin, or disability. We have extended that definition to include membership in a social group. The “hate speech” label has become a catch phrase for anyone who feels “insulted”; it becomes the mantra of the “victim” philosophy.
The definition of hate speech has become a moving target and freedom of speech is a concept some try to mold to their agenda; some see freedom of speech as, in one instance, a threat, and, in their rhetoric, a means to marginalize adversaries whom they accuse of hate speech. The throttling and then the exercising of the freedom has moved into the governing domain, with elected officials decrying “hate speech” and at the same time attempting to disempower a segment of the society by using inflammatory language. Most recently we have seen both the President and Vice-President condemning “hate speech by the Right, while at the same time, calling all Conservatives deplorables or MAGA Republicans with the clear intent of labeling all of them in a negative manner.
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” Harry S. Truman
The very fact that we have the liberty of free speech means that we have the absolute right to our thoughts and expressions though we would insult and be, in turn insulted. There exists no insulation from being the object of another’s acclaim or disdain. We must be prepared to “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. There is no right to “not be offended”.
When we endeavor to place ourselves in the public domain, should it be to elected office, social demonstration, even something as common place as writing a letter to the editor, we must be prepared to also accept that others will not hold to our opinions and they have the right to disagree and not always in the expression we would like.
The notion that we can regulate speech, label speech as ”hate speech”, runs contrary to the whole idea of free expression and does great harm to the society, to our Republic.
“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” Benjamin Franklin
To be a society which is able to think, we must, in turn, take the risk of offending and being offended. If we are not going to use free speech to criticize our society, our actions, our government, then why have it? We have the liberty to have opinions and to have the right to voice those opinions and have them defended against any consensus, any majority or minority at any time and in any place. Even my most unpopular, and possibly even vulgar, expression is to be as stringently defended as anyone’s. To do otherwise is censorship. To do otherwise leads us down the road to the destruction of the Republic. Freedom of speech, of expression, is our liberty above all other liberties. To abandon that is to silence any dissent, no matter how noble.
“If there’s one American belief I hold above all others, it’s that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is “right” and what is “best” should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. … As a nation, we’ve been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn’t approve of them.” Stephen King