In these contentious times, various forms of censorship or discouragement of free speech are continually being fiercely debated.
National Review Online writer Kevin Williamson, hired by the Atlantic for his scorched-earth attacks on Donald Trump, was fired after one column because of his scorched-earth attacks on women who’ve had abortions. Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham’s show has been boycotted by nearly 20 corporate advertisers because of her tweet mildly tweaking David Hogg about his failure to get into some universities. Hogg, of course, is the 17-year-old survivor of the recent mass shooting at a Florida high school who has become a petulant catspaw for the antigun lobby. Meanwhile, revelations of private data being sold or left vulnerable by Facebook, and the continuing censorship of political views by that platform along with YouTube and Google, have heated up calls for subjecting social media to government regulations.
Seems like dangerous times for our first inalienable right, the one protecting free and open speech. But before we endorse policies that end up making matters worse, we should be clear about why the Founders gave us a right that few other nations, including the E.U. states, allow their citizens.
What our Constitution recognizes is that free political speech is indispensable for exercising political freedom, the ability to openly participate in political deliberations. From its beginning in ancient Athens, the constitutional government that made the people sovereign also created the idea of free speech. If people are free to deliberate about and vote for the policies the state pursues, then citizens have to be free to speak publicly without fear of legal restraints or retribution. Unlike elsewhere in antiquity, in ancient Athens there were two words for “free speech,” one of which was also the name of a warship, bespeaking the importance of that right for citizens. And each meeting of the Assembly of citizens opened with the question, “What man has good advice to give the city?” which Euripides praised as “the call of freedom.”
Nor could subjective standards of decorum or “proper” speech be allowed to silence the citizens. In Fifth Century Athens, the rules governing speaking in the Assembly focused mainly on keeping inept, abusive, or repetitive speakers from wasting the citizens’ time. Outside the Assembly, there were no rules. The tragic and comic stages were one of the most important venues of political debate. The policies of Athens, particularly its brutalities during the Peloponnesian War, were criticized in front of 15,000 citizens in the Theater of Dionysus the Liberator, the cult name of the god linking theater to political freedom. Comedy was particularly brutal, depicting politicians by name on the stage and accusing them of every sexual depravity, along with being the spawn of foreign prostitutes and betraying the city for money. So important was this freedom of expression that Aristophanes’ favorite target, the demagogue Cleon, failed to persuade the government to silence the poet.
