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Free Our SpeechJuly 04, 2009
The older I get, the more awed I am by the U.S. Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. By today's standards the drafters were not a diverse lot: every one was a white male property owner. But in the 220 years since it went into effect, it has proved flexible enough to grow with a country that becomes more diverse with each passing decade, while comparable documents in other countries often don't survive the regime that promulgates them. What is its secret? Privileged though the founders were, they clearly had lack of privilege in mind as they drafted the new document. As colonial subjects, their rights had been regularly violated by the colonial authorities. Their freedom, their property, and even their lives had been at risk. They took threats to those rights very seriously. They were not just thinking about small, distant, or unpopular minorities. They were thinking about themselves. The right to free speech was very high on their list, along with the closely associated freedom of the press and the right to peaceably assemble. They knew from personal experience that the right to talk to oneself was not enough. The right to circulate one's words -- in meetings or in print, the "mass media" of the time -- was crucial in resisting an abusive government. Note, however, that the First Amendment imposes no obligation on citizens to speak responsibly, or on the press to act in the public interest. It specifies only that Congress shall not get in the way. For the rest we're on our own. The murder of Dr. George Tiller on May 31 has focused attention on these freedoms. Dr. Tiller, one of the few doctors in the U.S. willing to perform late-term abortions, had been threatened repeatedly over the years. Much of the rhetoric directed against him, on the World Wide Web, in newspapers, and on commercial airwaves, was vile, intemperate, even incendiary. Some of it advocated stopping him by any means, legal or illegal. Some people believe there should be legal restrictions against such extreme forms of "hate speech." I don't. Yet I do believe that out-of-control speech helped create the climate in which someone decided that killing Dr. Tiller was a moral and upstanding thing to do. Speech is not innocuous. It can be dangerous. The drafters of the U.S. Constitution knew that: it had, after all, helped free the American colonies from Great Britain. So the First Amendment doesn't make exceptions for speech that makes people nervous, or speech that advocates unpopular points of view, or even speech that recommends breaking the law. Laws that restrict speech for any of these reasons are on shaky ground. When Congress in its panic passed the Patriot Act, they forgot that. Many of its members have yet to recover from their amnesia. But though the First Amendment says that Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, it doesn't order the citizenry to let irresponsible speech pass without comment. Nor does it guarantee anyone access to the mass media. As journalist A. J. Liebling famously said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Back before cell phones, when bullhorns were the best and cheapest method to communicate with a large and mobile crowd of people, every astute demonstration organizer knew that there were some people who just could not be trusted with a bullhorn. Either they'd go off on a crowd-control ego trip or they'd sound so panicky that they'd scare everybody else. Denied access to a bullhorn, plenty of people yelled that they were being censored, but they weren't. They were free to say anything they wanted. They were free to go get their own bullhorn. They had no constitutional right to the organizers' bullhorn. If I were king, I'd be sorely tempted to take some people's bullhorns away. It's just as well I don't have that power. We the people, however, do. The presses and media outlets that amplify the voices of hate speakers are subject to economic pressure. We are free to organize and publicize a boycott of the outlets and advertisers who amplify hateful voices, while supporting the advertisers who do otherwise. We are free to counter hateful speech in one-to-one conversation, at the supper table, and in the workplace. It's important that we do so, even when speaking out makes us uncomfortable or even puts us at some risk. Most hateful speech doesn't inspire murder or other criminal activity, but it has serious subtler effects. An unrelenting spew of bilious thinking drowns out quieter, more thoughtful voices. It stifles rational thought, the sharing of personal experience, and discussion of ideas. And it spreads: you can't go to any major newspaper's website without finding post after post of this regurgitated bilge in the comments sections. It's one reason the political climate in this country is so dismal. Swallow enough canned soup and you forget what the good stuff tastes like, and why it's worth the effort to make your own. Today it's 233 years to the day since the Continental Congress officially adopted the Declaration of Independence. I, like millions of my fellow citizens, am wondering how this country is going to pull out of the mess we're in. I'm going to spend this July 4 going back to basics: the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The signers of one and the drafters of the other not only set us a high standard, they expected us to live up to it. Let's give them our best.
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