From the old box: Free Speech, but Not for All?

Free Speech, but Not for All?

By Ted Gup

Just over a century ago, the president of a distinguished college barred the suffragette and human-rights activist Jane Addams from speaking on campus, and suspended a student named Inez Milholland for organizing others in support of women’s rights. Milholland would go on to become influential in the women’s movement, and the college president, James Monroe Taylor, would become yet another example of an overly protective and historically myopic educator. He believed that women should be “not leaders, but good wives and mothers” — the prevailing view of the day.

Ulrich Baer cites the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who “shifted attention away from the content of free speech to the way certain topics restrict speech as a public good.

Some topics, such as claims that some human beings are by definition inferior to others, or illegal or unworthy of legal standing, are not open to debate because such people cannot debate them on the same terms.”

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Baer suggests that denying controversial speakers a forum still leaves them with the internet, disregarding that the internet also provides a powerful forum for groups whose voices were long suppressed. The internet and social media have removed many of the barriers to entry and provided accessibility to even the most splintered and historically marginalized of groups. To ignore this or to suggest otherwise is to infantilize such groups or imply that their messages are not competitive or compelling in the marketplace of ideas. To shield minorities from such speech is to disrespect them and assign them a fragility that many would not welcome.

“To protest free speech in the name of protecting women is dangerous and wrong,”

said Betty Friedan.

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Abolitionists, gay and lesbian people, civil-rights activists, feminists, and others on the cutting edge of social change were all, in their day, barred from one university podium or another. Educators argued that their remarks might cause a disturbance, might undermine moral teachings, discomfort students, and offend the wider community.

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Baer suggests that the free-speech argument is overly simplistic and static

“The parameters of public speech must be continually redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing,”

he says. Yet the idea of an organic and flexible standard of free speech, appealing as it may be, would strip it of the consistency that is the bulwark that stands between all controversial speakers and the despots who would silence them. It is not difficult in some far-left and far-right schemes to imagine the likes of Professor Baer himself being silenced. And his advocacy of a dynamic line between protected and unprotected speech grants a license to those in power to smother dissent of all sorts, particularly that of minorities and outliers.

The absolutist approach to free speech, to be sure, has its flaws. But for all its offenses, for all the broken china, for all the divisiveness and trauma it has caused, it remains the best and only instrument for insuring a free intellect and a more just society. It is not a matter of equality versus liberty, but as Owen Fiss, the Yale scholar of the First Amendment and outspoken champion of free speech, has argued, equality through liberty. Fiss observes that when speech has been curtailed, it has historically been the unheard, the underrepresented, and the deprived who have paid the steepest price. The lesson then is not to turn the quest for equality into a cudgel to be wielded against those whose values or positions one does not share.

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Free speech is the greatest single ally of social justice and, even at its most noxious and repulsive, is often a catalyst for reflection and remediation. It is easy to mistake it for a tool of repression when, in fact, it is the antidote. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism do not respond to verbal anodynes. They must be addressed at their roots. Argument, reason, confrontation, and direct exposure to the psyche of bigotry remain the best hope.