As usual, this semester is a busy one for me.
It can be hard to follow even major happenings around the world.
Perhaps because of this, I almost missed an important development closer to home.
On March 2, the Supreme Court voted 8-1 that the First Amendment protects Westboro Baptist Church members who protest at military funerals.
As a Christian, I do find members of the Westboro Church go too far. Their protests inflict pain on the innocent and those they target without distinction. Though I do not agree with them, I do agree they have the right to protest about anything they want.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.”
The quote was given to argue the limits of free speech but, in this new age of the fist of government censorship and political correctness born out of 9/11, it is equally applicable to the case for its free exercise.
Almost all of us argue about the issues that arise in our day-to-day lives.
Seemingly anyone who disagrees with them on some important point is fair game nowadays. And those people, in turn, lobby right back in the other direction just as fiercely. This happens all over the world, but not the same way.
What separates the protests in Libya from, say, those in Wisconsin, is not some mystical force working all around us.
It is free speech, and it is its power that allows one country to civilly resolve their differences (relatively speaking) while another tears itself apart over them.
Free speech can be abused too, as many felt was the case for Westboro protestors. Yet the danger we face by limiting free speech should not be taken lightly. When I look around, I notice a disturbing trend in a number of my friends and neighbors.
Many people seem to believe in free speech only as it allows them to express their opinions, but are all too eager for some government entity to restrict it for those that disagree with them. The mentality would be funny if I didn’t see so many people subscribing to it.
The truth of the matter is free speech has to be given to everyone or it doesn’t really belong to anyone. If people start drawing distinctions between types of free speech, then we will be in danger of losing that liberty completely.
Coming full circle, this ruling tells me two things.
First, everyone has a right to express his or her opinion, even if others feel it’s wrong. But when we make the painful decision to protect that first right for others, we also protect it for ourselves.