The University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus.
A free society is one that safeguards people’s right to stand up for their deeply held beliefs, regardless of popularity. That theme will be the focus of a presentation scheduled for tonight on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus.
The address is timely. Our country just went through a hard-fought campaign season, with plenty of sharp rhetoric not only from campaigns but also from chat-show commentators and from regular citizens via social media.
In addition, our country has witnessed an unsettling eruption of explicitly racist and anti-Semitic language on social media. Some unhinged individuals have committed or threatened hideous violence, targeting people on the basis of their politics, race or religion.
At UNL tonight, Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor at the New York University School of Law, will deliver remarks titled “Hate: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that under the First Amendment, Americans are free to spout crackpot claims or even outrageous ones. The court ruled it constitutional in 1977, for example, for neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, whose population included a large Jewish population with many Holocaust survivors. Such First Amendment protections are also why members of the Westboro Baptist Church have considerable legal leeway to stand in public and shout inflammatory taunts as part of their funeral “protests.”
This doesn’t mean such repulsive language should go unchallenged. On the contrary, as the title of Strossen’s remarks indicates, the Constitution fully acknowledges Americans’ right to speak out forcefully to counter vile or disgusting rhetoric. In addition, courts have ruled that governments have a degree of regulatory power to keep protesters a certain distance from mourners.
What’s out of bounds, under the Constitution, is for government to set the boundaries for what’s allowable for speech, with the exception that society can restrict speech that seeks to incite violence.
Government restrictions on free speech have a doubly harmful effect.
First, it chokes off individual liberty, by telling an individual that his or her speech is limited not by the person’s judgment but by the arbitrary dictates of the state.
Second, it short-circuits one of the great strengths of a free society: the open exchange of ideas that submits arguments to rigorous scrutiny and challenge. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes summed up that societal principle by writing that “the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas.”
Some developed countries do attempt to restrict political speech, setting up panels that deliver verdicts on the permissibility of specific speech. Penalties are sometimes levied. Under such a system, the boundaries for acceptable speech are arbitrary — and hence movable. Speech that was permitted one year might be ruled by government as out of bounds of the next. A society’s political debates thus become guided by government fiat rather than by constitutional principles that buttress individual liberty.
