In their opinion piece “It Is Every American’s Right to Curse the President” (2021), The New York Times’ Editorial Board argues that the strong free speech protections enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States must themselves be protected from the good intentions of those who would restrict speech that is deeply offensive to the community or to national leaders, as seen in a recent court decision where a woman was ordered to remove banners that used extremely offensive language about President Biden. The Editorial Board agrees both that the signs in question, which Andrea Dick had put up in her front yard in full view of her neighbours, are extremely offensive, and that she had intended to offend her neighbours. However, the board rebuts the argument that obscenity is a sufficient reason to ban such language from public display. Their first argument is the legal one that a previous US Supreme Court opinion in 1971 has clearly established that even the English verb which is “not actually advocating sexual intercourse” with the object noun in such contexts, as a lawyer in that case described it, is “legally protected in political statements” by the US Constitution, and that the New Jersey court ruling is contrary to that precedent set by the Supreme Court. The Editorial Board next explains why the Supreme Court is right to have upheld the right of Americans to use the most offensive words even in public and why all Americans should support that decision to maintain the strongest legal protection of free speech. They argue that keeping their freedom depends on Americans continuing to support their democracy’s emphasis on the value of free speech. The first opposing concern the board notes is that some are questioning the traditional American respect for free speech because divisions over politics mean that many no longer trust the other side to respect the tradition of tolerance for ideas that they dislike, so that Republicans in some states are passing laws to ban some expressions of ideas, such as race protests. From another side, Democrats are said to be guilty of falsely equating offensive speech with violence that must be outlawed. Whilst insisting that actual violence not be tolerated, the Editorial Board emphasizes that “Democracy requires that we feel safe while shouting at each other.”
Reference
Editorial Board. (2021, July 24). It is every American’s right to curse the president. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/24/opinion/sunday/free-speech-case-New-Jersey.html
I chose this article, an essay in the opinion section of The New York Times (NYT), because it is a powerful example of how theoretical concerns, in this case what is just, intersect with very practical questions about not only what the law should be but also what constitutes a just society. I don't always, but in this case I also agree with the NYT's Editorial Board's thesis, which is that free speech is so foundational a principle of democracy that it must be upheld and strongly protected by the law even when we greatly dislike some of the consequences of that. Personally, I agree with her neighbours that Ms. Dick's use of the F-word is offensive. Interestingly, the Editorial Board, consistent with NYT policy, never actually uses the word that is central to their essay - but manage to communicate very well exactly what the offending word is. However, I don't think that my personal preferences should be forced on everyone. Ms Dick seems to me to have displayed poor manners, but that is not something that the law should dictate.
ReplyDeleteAnd that brings me to the title I've chosen, which took me a bit of time to think of, but then I remembered that we we've just been reading about conflict in the workplace being essential for productivity, and that seemed a useful idea to apply here. A healthy democracy must have conflict: there would seem to be something wrong if people did not have strong differences of opinion about important issues confronting their society, and since democracy requires that all have an equal right to a voice in forming their society from which comes the government that makes the laws that all must obey, you can't be a democracy without having strong legal protection for free speech, so that, as the NYT so neatly puts it, "we feel safe while shouting at each other." (That concluding clause I've quoted actually occurs in the middle of the essay I've summarized, but I thought it helped make a strong concluding sentence to my summary paragraph.)
The image is the one that accompanies the NYT article. When you publish your own summary paragraph, you might also like to add an image from your source. Most articles in the NYT have at least one accompanying image.
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