Revisiting the First Amendment

The First Amendment is often inconvenient.  But that is beside the point.  Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.
            Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy

Have you ever read the Bill of Rights?  These are the first ten amendments to the Constitution that were intended to mollify the Anti-Federalists who opposed a government with a stronger federal authority.  It is an amazing experience to read what our Founding Fathers considered important and a necessity to include in our founding document.  Almost as amazing as what is said is what is not enumerated within the Constitution.  I’ve written on the topic of free speech in the past but never have the times called for an explanation of what was not said in the First Amendment. 

Recently, in the National Review, editorialist Jim Geraghty reminded readers of the first time some folks around the world threw their hands up in outrage over “blasphemous” language in the form of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.  He posted within his article a video of a Saturday Night Live skit where Phil Hartman and Glenn Close play Barnes and Noble employees fighting off an angry mob with machine guns and evasive maneuvers to continue selling books.  A “dying” Hartman declared that perhaps they should only sale Muslim literature or have “Ayatollah birthday sales.”  Among the laughs and the wincing, it occurs to the viewer that there was a time where we answered this kind of outrage with a reaffirmation of our belief in freedom of speech or expression. 

However, the intended limitation to freedom of speech is not limited to a handful of extremists.  Some Americans have wondered about the protection of speech when it comes to a group of horrid people, members of a “church” out of Topeka, Kansas who protest the funerals of soldiers with the most despicable slogans aimed at the military and homosexuals.  In 1969, the Supreme Court ruled that the racist rant of a KKK leader was protected because it was not designed to call for immediate violence.  In 1995, the Court ruled that the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council were not required to allow the Irish American Gay Group of Boston to march with them in a private parade because doing so would violated the veterans’ freedom of speech by forcing them to espouse something with which they disagreed.  In 1989, the Court ruled that a Texan named Gregory Johnson was within his constitutional rights to burn the American flag.  Two decades earlier, the Court protected students protesting the Viet Nam War with a black arm band in school. 

Throughout our history, we’ve struggled with the consequences of our national convictions and we’ve struggled to live up to the best intentions of our forefathers.  We’ve been tasked with, as Americans, to accept the notion that freedom of speech must apply to those things we don’t like more than anything else.  Indeed, we have no such freedom if it only applies to that speech we find acceptable.  When we stand against someone like the Phelps family in Topeka, we worry about the soldiers, their families and gay men and women who serve as a foil for twisted minds and blackened hearts.  Therefore, we say to ourselves, there must be something that we can do to prevent such speech.  We see violence throughout the world over movies or cartoons and we worry about the American families who have lost loved ones or the Muslim families who huddle in the dark, hoping for the light of tolerance and rationality – for themselves and the ignorance of others who seek to besmirch them.

Roman senator and historian Tacitus said, “The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates.”  From the past, comes a warning.  We, as a nation, must have the security in our own beliefs and our own ideas to not only tolerate the repugnant but to explain our ideas in the spirit it was intended and not shrink from them.  When some might say, “this should not be allowed,” we must make the case that a freedom for our friends only is no freedom at all.  The more conditions we place on such an inalienable right, the more the government legislates and decides for us what is and is not acceptable.  We will continue to surrender our rights until one day, no one may speak and the tyranny that Americans have feared since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton will ultimately destroy us.