Why its important to defend freedom of speech, even when you object to the content: an elaboration on my last post, with a look at the critical court decision. As I mentioned at the end of my last post about the history of free speech in the U.S., the 1925 Supreme Court decision that established (in practice) a national guarantee of freedom of speech was Gitlow v. New York. Benjamin Gitlow, a revolutionary socialist, had been convicted of having advocated, advised and taught the duty, necessity and propriety of overthrowing and overturning organized government by force, violence and unlawful means. Today we tend to forget how frightening revolutionary socialism was in 1925. The Soviet Union was new, and boiling with revolutionary fervor. Revolutions had flared up (only to be suppressed by Fascists and similar groups) in Italy and Germany. Many Americans had serious, and not entirely irrational, fears of revolutionary violence in the United States. So Gitlow was no crackpot. He was dangerous. So dangerous Clarence Darrow defended him, though he did not handle the appeal. As I mentioned before, the framers of the 14th Amendment explicitly intended it to protect citizens from state laws that violated the Bill of Rights—as John A. Bingham declared on the floor of the House in February 1866. Not until 1925, in Gitlow, did the high court agree. It ruled, We may and do assume that freedom of speech and of the press — which are protected by the First Amendment from abridgment by Congress — are among the fundamental personal rights and liberties protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from impairment by the States. Our freedoms are defined by those who test them with extremes. You dont have to agree with them. Frankly, I hope you generally dont. Freedom of speech is often upsetting, or its not really freedom. And we never know how things will look in the future. Whats dangerous to one generation—abolitionist writings, for example, banned by the slave states before the Civil War—is not to another.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 18:01:17 +0000
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