Many have promoted the fallacy that freedom of speech in America is not absolute. The truth is the opposite.
Free speech is absolute, or it would not be in the Bill of Rights.
Some repeat the tired talking point that “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater” as a pretext to ban protected speech. Right now, there is a nefarious effort to silence dissent and to narrow the opportunities for Americans to use social media to communicate. The American people should embrace freedom for people to express various opinions – even odious ones.
A 1919 decision is where the “Fire in a Crowded Theater” talking point was invented. Jonathan Turley wrote at Fox News on June 25 that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s quote about fire was a “paraphrasing of his decision in Schenck v. United States (that) continues to be used today as a rationalization for censorship and limits on free speech.” The real heroes of free speech were not members of the Supreme Court but the “anarchists, unionists, communists, feminists and others who risked everything to fight for their right to speak.” Our nation has a history of cracking down on free speech values, and Turley concludes that we are now in “the most dangerous anti-free speech period in our history.” […]
– Read More: pjmedia.com
