Rights for the Undeserving

I some­times feel like the last per­son still liv­ing who holds free speech, free expres­sion, free inquiry, and all our civ­il lib­er­ties which shall not be infringed by gov­ern­ment to be near absolutes and not mere­ly con­ve­nient rhetor­i­cal tools to be jock­eyed around by whomev­er hap­pens to be in power.

I’m both old enough and semi-lucid enough to remem­ber when orga­ni­za­tions like the ACLU took prin­ci­pled stands on what­ev­er front civ­il lib­er­ties bat­tles were being fought, how­ev­er unlik­able the defen­dant; not just sedate­ly fil­ing ami­cus briefs here or there, but ril­ing three quar­ters of the coun­try at any giv­en time by bom­bas­ti­cal­ly defend­ing the rights of ter­ror­ists or neo-nazis or whomev­er was believed to be obvi­ous­ly unde­serv­ing of those rights.

It’s always the obvi­ous­ly unde­serv­ing who con­vince us, with­out us con­scious­ly real­iz­ing it, to give away our own rights, because prece­dents don’t stick to just one class of peo­ple or one man­ner of expres­sion. It was always inevitable that polit­i­cal maneu­ver­ing that tried to weasel its way around free speech by cre­at­ing sophis­tic lit­tle excep­tions — speech as unmea­sur­able and abstract vio­lence, pre­tend­ing that rude and hate­ful words were equiv­a­lent to assault or incite­ment — would ulti­mate­ly be turned on us.

Lit­tle dis­tin­guish­es democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca more sharply from Europe than the pri­ma­cy — and per­mis­sive­ness — of our com­mit­ment to free speech. Yet ongo­ing con­tro­ver­sies at Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties sug­gest that free speech is becom­ing a par­ti­san issue. While con­ser­v­a­tive stu­dents defend the impor­tance of invit­ing con­tro­ver­sial speak­ers to cam­pus and giv­ing offense, many self-iden­ti­fied lib­er­als are engaged in increas­ing­ly dis­rup­tive, even vio­lent, efforts to shut them down. — The Atlantic, Decem­ber 2, 2017

And it was always pre­dictable to any­one with the slight­est sliv­er of insight into human behav­ior that the more you sup­press a thing, the bold­er and more brazen and more mon­strous it tends to become. We’re begin­ning to see what sup­pres­sion can do to our own char­ac­ter and val­ues; so, to para­phrase Kipling, be warned by our lot (which I know you will not)…