We in America need to re-read and cling to our constitution, and especially to our Bill of Rights. We need to teach their importance to our children, particularly the importance of the first amendment, the most fundamental of freedoms upon which all the rest reside: the freedom of speech.
Because some numbskulls are starting to wonder whether America should be more like Europe and be more restrictive about free speech.
“In much of the developed world, one uses racial epithets at one’s legal peril, one displays Nazi regalia and the other trappings of ethnic hatred at significant legal risk and one urges discrimination against religious minorities under threat of fine or imprisonment,” Frederick Schauer, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in a recent essay called “The Exceptional First Amendment.”
“But in the United States,” Schauer continued, “all such speech remains constitutionally protected.”
Canada, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia and India all have laws or have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Israel and France forbid the sale of Nazi items like swastikas and flags. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in Canada, Germany and France.
Last week, the actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, was fined €15,000, or $23,000, in France for provoking racial hatred by criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughter of sheep.
By contrast, U.S. courts would not stop the American Nazi Party from marching in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977, though the march was deeply distressing to the many Holocaust survivors there.
Six years later, a state court judge in New York dismissed a libel case brought by several Puerto Rican groups against a business executive who had called food stamps “basically a Puerto Rican program.” The First Amendment, Justice Eve Preminger wrote, does not allow even false statements about racial or ethnic groups to be suppressed or punished just because they may increase “the general level of prejudice.”
Some prominent legal scholars say the United States should reconsider its position on hate speech.
“It is not clear to me that the Europeans are mistaken,” Jeremy Waldron, a legal philosopher, wrote in The New York Review of Books last month, “when they say that a liberal democracy must take affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack.”
Waldron was reviewing “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment” by Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times columnist. Lewis has been critical of attempts to use the law to limit hate speech.
[...]
Harvey Silverglate, a civil liberties lawyer in Boston, disagreed.
“When times are tough,” he said, “there seems to be a tendency to say there is too much freedom.”
“Free speech matters because it works,” Silverglate continued. Scrutiny and debate are more effective ways of combating hate speech than censorship, he said, and all the more so in the post-Sept. 11 era.
“The world didn’t suffer because too many people read ‘Mein Kampf,”‘ Silverglate said. “Sending Hitler on a speaking tour of the United States would have been quite a good idea.”
Bravo, Mr. Silverglate! Bravo!
When people are free to speak their minds, you know who they are and what they’re standing for. If they want to show a nazi flag, well…you know who and what they are, don’t you? You know what you’re dealing with. It’s honest. It’s open. It’s free. If a feeling gets hurt, aw, that’s too bad.
Hurt feelings are the price of freedom, and I’d rather have 50 emails calling me all sorts of names because of my Christianity or my classically liberal politics (some call it “conservatism,” but then again today’s “conservatives,” used to be called “liberals,” and today’s “liberals” used to be called “socialists”, so deal) or because of my stance on any given issue, than have everyone moving about the country in a silent agony of self-censorship and repression.
Free speech is part of what makes America great, and singular. It is what leaves America unbent when the rest of the world is cowering. Americans will die for freedom - for the freedom to say what they like, be who they are and to bend the knee only if they choose to do so, and then (usually) before no one but the Creator.
And they’ll die helping to bring that sort of freedom to others.
You don’t surrender your right to speak freely in some misbegotten effort to legislate “niceness.” To do that is to admit you are too frightened to be free.
Wusses.
Jonah Goldberg has more thoughts on that NY Times article and they’re well-worth reading.
Related: Watch this film
June 11th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
I imagine A has already read David Warren’s essay “Deafening silence” on how terribly wrong things are going in Canada in the struggle for free speech. It is sad and frightening to see such close brothers inflict a Mao-like Cultural Revolution on themselves.
June 11th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Left out the address: http://davidwarrenonline.com/
June 11th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
When elites propose to take things away from us for the common good, our money is not the most valuable thing they want to seize.
(Anchoress, fyi I submitted a comment on your previous post. Maybe it incurred your displeasure, but more likely your spam filter’s.)
June 11th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
I applaud the post and warmly endorse your defense of the First Amendment (I take it as a given that you’re solid on the Second as well). Since the post title was “Cling to The Bill of Rights,” may we look forward to brief essays touching upon the others? It probably won’t be necessary to spend much time deploring the erosion of our rights not to have soldiers quartered in our domiciles in peacetime, but some of us are particularly concerned about numbers Four through Eight these latter years. “Too frightened to be free?” That is what some of us have been saying about the devil’s bargain that proponents of the national security state offer: safety through universal surveillance. Safety through “enhanced interrogation.” No thank you. That’s a far greater threat to our ancient liberties than anything a fanatic in a cave might devise.
cordially,
June 11th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Rand you go back into my archives from early 2005 and you’ll see that I have not been entirely happy with some of what has been passed, either. Because while you and I can and will disagree about whether this administration pushed too hard against some of our freedoms - for the sake of protecting us - it always made me uneasy to know that sooner or later, and I fear sooner, another administration would take things much farther, less to protect us than to control us. Some of Michelle Obama’s stuff about how Barack is going to “force” changes upon us raise my antennae, but I know you’re in the process mixing the sugar into the kool-aid, as you said, so I’ll leave that there.
As I said, we’ll disagree…but you’ll note, its not Mr. Bush who keeps demanding apologies from newscasters, that’s always a Democrat. And it wasn’t the Bush administration shutting down films they didn’t want broadcast or put on DVD, that was the Clinton machine.
Your tribe likes to pretend that someone is suppressing them…but it’s been the Pelosis and the Clintons who’ve made those noises.
There is a distinction between freedoms pushed against for protection and those overtaken for control, but it’s a real subtle-like one…kind of like the difference between “shrill” and “strident.”
June 11th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
It was in the spamfilter, gs - as you thought. I rarely dump a comment!
June 11th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth - only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
C. S. Lewis
June 11th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Wusses
No, MAJOR wusses. Super wusses, even…
June 12th, 2008 at 12:04 am
And remember: freedom OF religion does not mean freedom FROM religion. There is no mention of “separation of church and state” in the Bill of Rights.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:18 am
There are people who are in positions of power and influence over others, such as the position of teachers over students, or employers over employees, who probably ought to have limits to free speech. What do you think?
June 12th, 2008 at 9:31 am
Show me somebody objecting about “hate speech” and I’ll show you a little Stalin just waiting to come out of the closet. And it seems there are no shortages of closets around nowadays. We’ve all been asleep on the job of being brave and irascible citizens of this Republic, and the decay started many many years before Dubya was even born. I’d date it from the advent of the Managerial State and the Managerial Corporation, which have turned us into docile field hands. Step 1 one of the recovery process is the daily and religious exercise of Amendment 1. As for Amendment 2, guard that like a bear her cub.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Sadly, the Constitution is becoming less and less a guarantor of fundamental rights, and more and more a suicide pact.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Very well said, I couldn’t agree more except to say calling them wusses was too easy on them. I’d call them worse than that, but since I’m trying to be a lady I won’t.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Want to limit speach? Just look to the north:
http://englishcatholicism.blogspot.com/2008/06/alberta-pastor-fined-7000-and-ordered.html
June 12th, 2008 at 11:33 am
[...] usual, the Anchoress hits the proverbial nail on its head and drives the sucker home with a single blow! This time its her reaction to the growing sentiment in some legal circles that [...]
June 12th, 2008 at 11:38 am
I’ve felt for years that our rights would be eroded, not by some kind of tyrannical takeover, but by people demanding the “protection” that giving up rights seems to confer.
The problem is - when you start banning stuff, it’s impossible to see where to stop. You can start with the good intentions of protecting the “feelings” of others, but soon find yourself having to ban religion from the public sphere, having to water down anything over the airwaves to the point where it’s either a discussion of the weather or childish programs like “Barney.”
It scares me greatly that we could, as a nation, decide to truncate or eliminate the First Amendment as a sop to “not hurting feelings” (which is really the basis for most speech regulation on college campuses and such).
June 12th, 2008 at 11:38 am
What annoys me NO END is that the 1st Amendment PROTECTS unpopular and offensive speech. Otherwise, if what you say is accepted by everyone, there’s no need for specific protection. It’s frightening that in North America in the 21st century we are even having this debate.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
[...] ANCHORESS & OTHERS– “..some numbskulls are starting to wonder whether America should be more like Europe [...]
June 12th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
YourDogStuff — I’m assuming you mean it annoys you that people don’t seem to GET that the First Amendment protects unpopular and offensive speech … not that the said protection itsef that annoys you. That wasn’t super clear but your second sentence leads me to believe that’s what you meant. We agree — but I thought I’d clarify just so others aren’t confused.
Moving on to my own comments, the ultimate problem in all of this, is of course, who gets to decide what is offensive? When enough people decide that “Merry Christmas” is offensive, those of us who love it are hosed. Many of the amendments that make up the Bill of Rights — especially the first two — are there precisely to protect against the downside of democracy — that being a tyrrany of the majority.
Our country never was supposed to be “a democracy” — but we do use democracy as a tool within the framework of our Constitution. We’re a Constitutional Republic that incorporates democratic input. There are certain things that are not to be run by popular vote here. And most people don’t seem to get THAT, either.
I doubt that civics is taught anymore. Or if it is, it must have become rather bastardized into something quite different from the study of how our system is supposed to work.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
Philmon, my son and I were just talking about “civics” classes. I said it was a shame they weren’t required anymore, and he wanted to know what they were.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Another addition to the must-read list –
Values in a Time of Upheaval, wherein Cardinal Ratzinger engages in an excellent discussion on truth, free societies, and political systems.
June 12th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
[...] The Anchoress - Cling to The Bill of Rights [...]
June 19th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
[...] Cling to The Bill of Rights [...]