Weekend Essay: Just How Far Should Free Speech Protections Extend?

Elon Musk says he is buying Twitter in order to protect the First Amendment and to subdue cancel culture? Seems like a reasonable goal. Leaving aside the question of whether Mr. Musk’s incomprehensible wealth would be better spent elsewhere, this saga has renewed the fascinating debate over whether and when we can place limitations on certain people’s speech and on the platforms made available to them.It is instructive to revisit the Southlake debacle, for instance, in which an administrator from the Carroll Independent School District advised educators teaching about the Holocaust to make sure that students could access books offering the opposing (i.e., Nazi) perspective. A vast majority can recognize the dangers of granting Nazis the same platforms as non-Nazis.What about the murkier situations, though? How much of an ear do we offer people accused of abuses to which there are few or no witnesses, and how much do we, as a society, come to the defense and aid in the protection of the alleged victims? If, as we know, PTSD Retraumatization is a legitimate medical threat to victims, shouldn’t the elevation of an abuser’s voice be viewed as a sort of ongoing or resurrected crime? Moreover, are we not then complicit in allowing it? When an alleged abuser’s defense is published even though we know that his or her alleged victims will suffer again after the issue is resurfaced, isn’t the public granting tacit endorsement to the abuser? Are we, in some way, protecting the wide berth that allows for all sorts of abuses in our society to go unpunished? In 2014, at a Berlin-based Catholic and Jewish Emerging Leadership Conference, I met and befriended a priest. Over beers one night — and in the throes of a passionate argument about the seal of confession — he said the threat of delegitimizing the practice outweighed that of protecting a single criminal offender. Yet in Judaism, the saving of a single life is equivalent to saving all the world; he was certain, though, that protecting people’s privacy represented the far greater net positive for the Catholic world.Is this how we’re meant to orient toward the protection of free speech? That, on the whole, what is gained is far more important than the sum of its fallout? And, if that’s the case, how are we meant to measure those two things against one another? Is it more important to teach children that all people are equally entitled to self expression than it is to signal to abusers that their offenses won’t be tolerated? Which of these, ultimately, yields greater safety? Which of these is more just? Must we, in the end, choose between safety and justice?On the subject of free speech, the Anti-Defamation League says the following:ADL passionately defends free speech in America. We recognize that the First Amendment protects even hateful or offensive speech, and we believe that the best answer to hate speech is not censorship, but more speech.The challenge we face today is that people are using their free speech rights in both the real and virtual worlds to propagate hate, and civility and respect are under assault. We see this trend on college campuses, in cyberspace, and in other arenas. In response, one of ADL’s priorities is to promote counterspeech, truth, and respectful dialogue without undermining free speech rights.So there you have the bottom line, given all the competing values and our inalienable First Amendment rights. I’m still not certain that some sort of witnessless-ongoing-crime category doesn’t need to be examined and pursued by our generation’s greatest legal minds.In the meantime, I suppose we’ll just have to get used to making a lot of noise about society’s ills and living in a cacophonous world.

Weekend Essay: Just How Far Should Free Speech Protections Extend?

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