Sweet Land of Liberty: First Amendment doubters
What distinguishes the United States from other nations is our enshrining freedom of speech and of the press in our Constitution’s First Amendment. Even democracies such as England prohibit “politically incorrect” speech that might offend people.
After all, in America, without the First Amendment, how could we effectively protest against government violations of the individual liberties guaranteed us by the rest of the Bill of Rights?
However, as annual reports released by the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center reveal, Americans are very divided on how much freedoms of speech and of the press should be allowed.
In this year’s recently released State of the First Amendment survey — conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut — 46 percent of the 1,000 people surveyed believe the American press has too much freedom. That’s up from last year’s 42 percent. To me, this reaction indicates that the news media is failing to provide the citizenry with the pivotal lessons on how crucial a free press has been in safeguarding our constitutional democracy (including the exposure of the horrors of slavery and the workplace abuses that led to child labor laws and other protections of American workers).
As for our respect for the Americans’ free-speech rights, 74 percent strongly agree that people should be allowed to express unpopular opinions. However, only 26 percent strongly agree that we should be allowed to say things in public that might be offensive to religious groups (36 percent strongly disagree). And only 18 percent strongly agree that people should be allowed to say in public things that might seem offensive to racial groups (47 percent strongly disagree).
But Americans, as the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, cannot honestly say they support the First Amendment unless they also support its guarantee of free speech for ideas they hate. So long as we are free to use our speech to rebut speech that we find offensive, even hateful, we are all protected by the First Amendment.
As I am convinced that the Bill of Rights should be taught in historical depth in our schools, I find especially troubling in this year’s survey that only 38 percent disagreed with this proposal.
In 1943, during World War II, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson — who was to become the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of the German Nazis — ruled that the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses in West Virginia had been unconstitutionally expelled from their public schools (and threatened to be sent to reform schools) for refusing to pledge allegiance and salute the flag. The parents of those children had also been threatened with prosecution for contributing to the delinquency of their kids.
In sending those children back to school, Jackson — in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette — wrote a definition of Americanism that should be delivered every year in school assemblies throughout the land, and posted at the entrance of the Justice Department, and both houses of Congress.
And, he emphasized, the fact that boards of education “are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount principles of our government as mere platitudes.”
That Supreme Court decision came down when we were fighting Hitler, when wartime patriotism could have and sometimes overshadowed our individual rights. I supported that war and our most recent one, which ended the need for mass graves in Iraq.
I also support the First Amendment, which empowers me with the freedom to say so, and you to disagree.
(Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights.)