Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. I am totally committed to this idea, even when faced with ideas that are contrary to my own views. Nonetheless, there's been a recent trend in Western society that endeavors to limit certain speech, and this causes me concern. I'm wondering how others might feel about unlimited expression and the efforts to curb specific ideas.
Until recently, free speech in the USA was only limited when it was likely to result in the commission of a crime, or in some other way threaten public order.
The obvious example is fraud: telling someone a lie in order to manipulate them into doing something that will benefit you but cause them harm or financial loss. "This car was only driven to church on Sundays by an old lady who never went more than 30mph" is the classic example. And even this is limited; we're expected to be wise enough to know that advertisements exaggerate.
In my view, "fraud" also neatly covers the common example of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. The person who yells is
lying in order to gain a
benefit, which is the entertainment value of watching people scrambling to get to the exits, and this causes
harm or financial loss to the people who have lost their opportunity to see the movie and wasted their valuable time; they might also be physically injured in the chaos.
Other examples of generally-accepted limits on free speech include:
- Advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by force. This may seem petty, and indeed you'd have to do a little more than write, "Let's storm Washington with assault rifles and overthrow the government," in a post on SciForums before anybody would bother prosecuting you. But in times of turmoil, or in the event of an attack on U.S. soil like 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, when a reasonable person might suspect that a home-grown revolt might be brewing that would aid our enemies, to advocate the overthrow of the government is to advocate a breakdown of civil society and to invite martial law.
- Fomenting a riot. Again, one guy with a bullhorn is probably not going to be prosecuted--although his bullhorn might be confiscated. But a group of people with torches yelling about injustice and recommending burning down buildings need to be stopped. (I was in L.A. during the Watts riots and also during the Rodney King riots. In both cases the rioters did far more harm to the people whom they claimed they wanted to help, than to the rest of us. I always tuned to the Spanish-language stations for better coverage of news in progress. I still cry when I remember the barefoot little boy standing on the sidewalk watching his apartment building burn down, saying to the camera, Yo tenía solo un par de zapatos, y entonces están quemados. "I only had one pair of shoes, and now they're burned up.")
- "Fighting words." If you and three buddies walk into a bar in East Los Angeles half an hour before closing time, when it's reasonable to assume that there are quite a few people inside who are A) of Mexican ancestry and B) drunk, and yell, "You damn Mexicans should go home," the odds are about 99% that a fight will immediately break out. I haven't been back to L.A. since the last century, but here in Maryland virtually every bar has a bouncer or two to handle such situations; still, even two big tough guys couldn't stop the brawl that remark would trigger.
- Conspiracy to commit a crime. This is a recent addition. Planning a crime is, after all, part of the crime itself. So getting together with your buddies to plan the crime is also part of the crime. It's often easier to follow mobsters to their hideouts and plant listening devices inside, than it is to find and follow the lackeys they hire to commit the actual crime, while they themselves are at the Policemen's Ball getting their photo taken with the Mayor.
Recently "hate speech" has been added to that list. Frankly I disapprove of that, even though I understand why it was added: penance. Americans with skin like mine have gotten away
literally with murdering people with different colored skin, different religions, different sexual preferences (and probably different ways of sharpening their pencils) for generations. This is just payback. So I don't complain. Having to watch my language is hardly going to compensate anyone for the friends, siblings, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents who were killed by bigots. I figure I'm getting away easy. Hell, my grandfather's parents were Jewish and I know that the "good Christian people" of Germany killed a lot of cousins of mine whose names I never knew.
if someone would say I hate cats and there is laws against hate speech. I would hate to see what could happen. Almost anything can be construed to be hate speech.
