From: egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges)
Subject: Re: Hate Speech Okay, says the Supreme Court
Originator: news@ernie.Princeton.EDU
Organization: Princeton University
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1992 21:53:27 GMT

In article <1992Jul26.003147.1330@eff.org> mnemonic@eff.org (Mike Godwin) writes:
>In article <RJBODKIN.92Jul25182140@laennec.lcs.mit.edu> rjbodkin@theory.lcs.mit.edu (Ronald Bodkin) writes:
>
>>	Even if you do not accept this important distinction, I
>>believe your point still falls.  There is no (legal) penalty attached
>>to passing an unconstitutional law; it is just struck down by the
>>supreme court.
>
>Exactly so. And the legislature can go right ahead and pass other 
>unconstitutional laws, articulating whatever principles it likes.
>No restraint on its freedom of speech.

This is getting rather close to a strictly formalist freedom of speech,
akin in its own way to the guarantees of freedom of speech found in
Communist constitutions.  Such a legislature has no "freedom" and
WHETHER OR NOT ITS BEHAVIOR IS RIGHT (or even sane) you cannot ascribe
"freedom" to such a legislature.

No, I am not saying that legislatures should have absolute freedom of
speech and unbridled powers to pass laws.  What I am saying is that
debates concerning free speech increasingly focus on hard cases and
borderline cases, to the detriment of free speech.  

To the founders, speech was not some isolated and ultimately impotent
phenomenon, some electronic buzzing on some radio phone-in show.  It was
an activity which took place in a matrix of street-corner oration, small
independent printing shops, and legislatures.  It had consequences for
which the signers of the Declaration of Independence were ready to die,
and it expressed real hopes that speech might also be action.

Contrast Viktora.  Is there any real sense his action was free?
Contrast the "flame" wars that fill up this network.  This is compulsive
behavior, not freedom.

All these arguments for "freedom" (or, as Aretha Franklin sings
mockingly of her man's desire to be "free", "oh freedom!") end up with
the possessor of freedom effectively free to merely wave his chops.
This buzzing, Bob Dylan's "ten thousand talkers but nobody listening",
is just as bad as the silence of Communist countries.

In a discussion in the gun group a few years ago, a couple of
progun posters approached my manager at a conference in St. Louis to
"complain", as they put it, about my "behavior."  I had engaged
anti-gun-control forces in hopes of clarifying my own previously
unexamined views on guns, an instinctual support for gun control that
originated in my father's accounts of his experiences as a neurosurgeon,
caring for victims of gun shot wounds.  This support was sharpened by an
incident in the mid-Eighties in which my ex-wife and mother of my
children was nearly killed by a man intent on murdering his girlfriend,
my ex-wife's co-worker.  It happens that I am not a marginal employee of
Princeton University, and that I have excellent communications with my
boss.  But in a different situation my position could have been
seriously endangered by this, and I ask, where's this vaunted freedom?
How many viewpoints are unexpressed on this net by those with access,
with views, who are afraid to express same for fear for their jobs?

Where's the freedom?



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