Nat Hentoff: First Amendment As Discrimination Rights

Free Speech is thought to be free only for those on the Left, or Islamists, these days. Like "tolerance", it applies only to the actions of the Left and Islamists, for which we must empathize and be tolerant. Obama showed only tepid interest in the Paris shootings until forced by his image. Neither Free Speech nor tolerance applies to anyone else; their speech must be censored and actions not tolerated. For both the Left and for Islamists, that discrimination is a moral imperative which is dictated by their own Imams, Professors, and true believers: the Messiahs.

The continuing collapse of the 1st Amendment

"“What’s going on? It’s hard to resist the conclusion that too many of our college students evidently needed high school civics courses since they seem to have no idea what the basic thrust of the First Amendment – and free expression more broadly – is all about.”

Abrams continues: “And they are not alone. It shows me how many people – educated people, including scholars – seem to believe that the First Amendment should be interpreted as nothing but an extension and embodiment of their generally liberal political views.”

Floyd then speaks to all of us, not just the audience that evening at the FIRE anniversary. What he says is not being taught in the great majority of our public schools as he quoted Justice Robert Jackson:

“The very purpose of a Bill of Rights is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech and religion. ”

Please focus on what follows and thereby spread this essence of who we are:

“Every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the truth from the false for us.”

Abrams adds: “That’s not uniquely liberal or conservative; it is freedom-protecting, nothing more or less.”

The censorship of our free speech by the Bush-Cheney administration, and the even more restrictive Obama government, demonstrates why, as Justice William Brennan once told me, the First Amendment is our quintessential weapon against such freedom-pulverizing governments:

“It is the First Amendment from which all our other liberties flow,” by enabling us to protest and organize against an overwhelming government.

As for the current and growing contempt for the First Amendment at so many of our colleges and universities, Floyd Abrams emphasizes:

“One should not really have to say that of all places, campuses should be most protective of the broadest level of freedom of speech. Or that speakers should be permitted to have their say, instead of being booed off the stage as former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was at Brown last year. Or it is disgraceful that, as FIRE’s findings reveal, such topics as abortion, gay rights and the war on terror were the cause of many disinvitation incidents, and that the amount of disinvitation incidents has risen dramatically over the last 15 years; and that Harvard – you’ve heard of Harvard, I’m sure – has the most disinvitation incidents.

“What can one say about this other than to quote from the statement of the American Association of University Professors that, in the clearest language, observed that ‘on a campus that is free and open, no idea can be banned or forbidden. No viewpoint or message may be deemed so hateful or disturbing, that it may not be expressed.’”

Then Floyd Abrams brings us champion of free expression Oliver Wendell Holmes when, before the Civil War, he was a Harvard undergraduate and a student editor of Harvard Magazine:

“We must,” Holmes wrote in 1859, “have every thought brought before us when we are young, and we may as well at once prepare for it.”

Floyd summed up by quoting from a book that should be available to every college student: “The Shadow University,” by Harvey Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors, leading to their becoming founders of FIRE:

“In a nation whose future depends upon an education in freedom, colleges and universities are teaching the values of self-censorship and self-righteous abuse of power.”

As Floyd says: “That was true in 1998, when their book was published and, alas, it seems even more true today.”

In the 60s and 70s the Left demanded the Free Speech to burn American Flags, talk treason, and defecate in the dean's office. Today, they move to restrict Free Speech by silencing those accused of campus rape, denying the validity of Grand Juries, persecuting Christian private businesses and Christians in government who publish books which offend Victimhood Class weepers. They disallow conservatives to even speak on campuses. They march, shouting slogans that are factually false. The MSM, a dying institution, will show nothing about the Oppressor Class which is not oppressive of them. They penalize those who question data. It's a daily dose of screaming lies and calling names and assigning phobias on the one hand, and attempts to silence dissent on the other hand. And all the while, they puff up in their moral superiority.