My usual op-ed fare is writing about immigration and border control. The readers’ responses I have been getting from writing about that issue have prompted me to think recently about Free Speech and how Americans in particular handle dissenting views. I am not speaking about someone who writes me to rant about the positions I take on different issues. I expect that. What I mean are those who write and say that I should “shut up” or be “shut down” from expressing my views.
I do not get that at all! Why would so-called vanguards of Free Speech and Free Expression want to shut “anyone” down? Why would they want to silence someone who is expressing the rights that Americans supposedly are championing? Besides, isn’t this the reputation Americans think they represent to the rest of the worldChampions of Free Speech?
So what exactly is the deal? What’s going on with Americans these days? What has happened to simple, common respect for someone who has a dissenting view from your own? One would think, from the readers who write me as well as what one reads in the popular press, someone who takes a dissenting viewpoint from one’s own should be tarred and feathered at the very least. At the worst, he should be denied the necessities of life. Why is that?
Let’s Define Terms
Free Speech is an ideology that has as its heart humility, tolerance, and optimism. It is humility that allows for the possibility that what you believe might not be as “set in stone” as you once thought. It is humility that moves you to evaluate an argument for the sake of truth and not because you like the person giving the argument. It is also humility that forces you to evaluate the argument of the person you might find objectionable personallyagain for the sake of truth! Just because you find someone objectionable does not mean they CANNOT have something valid to say.
Free Speech has as its heart tolerance. I do not mean tolerance for someone preaching harm to another or for committing a crime. That is the line Free Speech does NOT cross. If someone wants to hold a public meeting and tell you how to build a bomb to blow up Chicago, then rational thinking dictates that is the line Free Speech does not cross. Free Speech has at its heart a tolerance for those with whom we don’t agree or understand.
When Jane Fonda was promoting her recent book, a Vietnam War Veteran who apparently took offence with her views, spit in the woman’s face. When Republican conservative Ann Coulter was invited to speak at a University, a male college student, who didn’t like what she was saying, physically assaulted her on-stage. Now, no matter what you think of someone on the left or the right of the political spectrum, these two women had the right of Free Expression and should be able to do so without the fear of reprisal. They were in essence punished for their dissenting point-of-view–that is Free Speech denial at its best.
Finally, Free Speech has at its heart a kind of optimism that Free Expression will triumph in the end.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said the following regarding the “marketplace of ideas”, in his dissent in Abrams v. U.S.:
“[W]hen men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas– that the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”
These are inspiring words to me as a writer and a Christian. The only tragedy I see is the “Market Place where the Free Trade in Ideas” thrives has left the building! Who closed it down and where can I find it again in America? If it is still there, I cannot see it. All evidence would lead me to believe that Market Place is no more in America.
The most recent example of this hit me very personally this morning. I awoke to an e-mail from a fellow with whom I dealt some months ago. A while back, he wrote my editor asking to reprint an article on the web site forum he runs in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
If you know nothing of San Miguel, it is a small Colonial Mexican town not too far from where I live. It has been an American Expatriate colony for many decades and has a large American gay community.
This person, after making the request for my article, apparently read my writing bio and discovered that I had written a small booklet on the “Gay Agenda”. This person made some large assumptions about the book, without having read it, and then retracted his request for my article reprint. That’s fineI have no problem with that.
I wrote the book from a Christian perspective. It was, in fact, a castigation of the Christian community for NOT loving their neighbors as themselves as Christ commanded in the New Testament. I make the argument that this includes our “gay” neighbors. I also evaluate the so-called evidence for “gays being born that way” and offer my dissenting view of the position taken by the “gay community”. I do not agree with their position. I offer a reasoned explanation for my view that gay sex is the result of one’s chosen sexual ethics.
That was my Free Speech that I expressed in the book.
That this fellow disagreed is fine by me. My life will go on. So this morning, I saw three e-mails from this same person’s e-mail address that contained viruses in attachments. I, of course, did not open them because I recognized the dangerous file extension. I also recognized his e-mail address.
What shall we make of this? Because I hold a different viewpoint and try to offer a reasoned argument why, should I be punished for my dissention? This is a salient example of the fact the “Market place of ideas where the free exchange of points and counterpoints has long left America and is no place to be found”!
Is this fascism?
Fascists ideologically rebel against Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. One has the liberty to express a dissenting view. One has the equality not to be treated differently or harmed for your dissenting voice. Finally, one has fraternity to be loved by your neighbor, as Christ commanded, despite having different views.
Whether fascism is running rampant in America today, I cannot say. It seems Americans have one foot in the door! Listen again to Justice Holmes, in his dissent in Gitlow v. U.S., where he recognized the full implication of free speech was to allow ideas to compete, no matter what the consequences:
“If in the long run, the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.”[1]
On the denial of Free Expression, Philosopher John Stuart Mill said this:
“[T]he peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”[2]
[1]
[2] Ibid
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