ESNW Summer Sunday Discussion Sunday July 11th
As Americans, one of our most cherished rights is the right to “free speech” guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. I’m sure all of us have heard and probably quoted the expression: “I despise what you’re saying, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” Since its founding in 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union has been one of the primary defenders of free speech rights. Famously, a Jewish ACLU lawyer successfully defended the right of Nazis in the 1970’s to march in Skokie, Illinois, home to many Holocaust survivors.
Lately, however, some liberals and progressives in the U.S.–including some lawyers and other staff at the ACLU–have begun to reassess the priority that free speech rights have come to have. According to the New York Times, these skeptics argue that the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and the press–as well as freedom of religion, assembly, and petitioning the government–are more often tools of the powerful and the privileged than the oppressed. Liberals and progressives who take this position argue that the first priority of people like themselves should be protecting and enhancing the position in society of marginalized people.
On July 25, we will be asking how sacred the rights of free speech and assembly ought to be. Should the ACLU and other defenders of free speech weigh the harm that free speech can inflict on society’s disadvantaged before agreeing to defend those who argue that their free speech rights are being curtailed?
Below find the titles and links to a couple of New York Times articles and letters on the subject as well the title and link to an article that appeared in the New York Review of Books. Adam Liptak, “How Conservatives Weaponized the First Amendment”
New York Times, June 30, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/us/politics/first-amendment-conservatives-supreme-court.html?searchResultPosition=1
Michael Powell, “Once A Bastion of Free Speech, the A.C.L.U. Faces an Identity Crisis”
New York Times, June 6, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html?searchResultPosition=1Michelle Goldberg, “The Left Needs the A.C.L.U. To Keep Defending Awful Speech”
New York Times, June 7, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/opinion/aclu-free-speech.html?searchResultPosition=2Letters to the Editor, “Conflicts Within the A.C.L.U. Over Free Speech and Racial Justice”
New York Times, June 19, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/19/opinion/letters/aclu-free-speech-race.html?searchResultPosition=2David Cole, “Why We Must Still Defend Free Speech”
New York Review of Books, September 28, 2017
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/28/why-we-must-still-defend-free-speech/