Anthony Lewis, the author of Gideon’s Trumpet and a champion of free speech, wrote in 2007, “Americans are freer to think what we will and say what we think than any other people, and freer today than in the past.” He went on, “Hateful and shocking expression, political or artistic, is almost all free to enter the marketplace of ideas.” wrote, “Such speech cannot be restricted simply because it is upsetting or arouses contempt.”Īmerican constitutional law regards free speech as a requirement for preserving and protecting competing values of equality, dignity, diversity, and tolerance. The Court held that the First Amendment protected even brutishly hateful speech at a protest about a military funeral-including signs with messages like “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”-as long as the demonstration was carried out where police said it could be. The most recent Supreme Court ruling to affirm Justice Holmes’s principle came in 2011. Paul has sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the First Amendment to the fire.” Paul ordinance was unconstitutional because it wasn’t neutral: it punished hate speech about race and color, for example, but permitted by omission “abusive invective” about “political affiliation, union membership, or homosexuality.” His opinion closed, “Let there be no mistake about our belief that burning a cross in someone’s front yard is reprehensible. Justice Antonin Scalia explained that the St. The law considered the cross burning expressive conduct and therefore speech. In this case, a group of teenagers who had burned a cross in the yard of a black family had been prosecuted under the ordinance. Paul, Minnesota, which made it a misdemeanor to put on public or private property a symbol like “a burning cross or Nazi swastika” that “arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender.” Known as a hate-speech law, and intended to punish and thus discourage abhorrent speech, it was similar to ones passed by the federal government and more than half the states. In 1992, the Court struck down the Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance of St. Forty thousand Jews-5,000 of them Holocaust survivors-lived in the village of 70,000. Indirectly, the Supreme Court supported loathsome free expression in 1978 when it let stand the ruling of a federal appeals court that said members of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of America had the right to march in uniforms with swastikas on armbands, through Skokie, Illinois. Harlan wrote that “while the particular four-letter word being litigated here is perhaps more distasteful than most others of its genre, it is nevertheless often true that one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.” In the Court’s majority opinion, Justice John M. The words expressed his strong opposition to Vietnam and the draft. In 1971, the Supreme Court relied on that principle to overturn the conviction of a young man who, in the Los Angeles Municipal Courthouse, had worn a jacket with “Fuck the Draft” on the back. Coming soon after the slayings in Paris at Charlie Hebdo, the weekly that has mercilessly mocked Islam and so much else, the affirmation of free speech brought to mind Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s view that “we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.” He later added, “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought-not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” In this year’s State of the Union, for example, President Obama, extolling American values as a pillar of our leadership around the world, put protecting free speech on his short list of practices that set the United States apart. Can free speech wreck the American experiment? The question at first seems crazy: Free speech is almost universally regarded as the heartbeat of democracy.
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