Swallowing the Bitter Pill: Protecting Speech We Hate

The Westboro Baptist Church, led by preacher Fred Phelps, became famous—or infamous—by protesting funerals. WBC members wave signs and shout slogans, the best-known of which is "God hates fags." This is usually supplemented with other eye-catching phrases specific to the death upon which they are capitalizing, such as "God killed your sons," "God sent the shooter," "God sent the IEDs," "God blew up the shuttle," or "Thank God for dead soldiers," 

In 2007, the family of Matthew Snyder, a Marine killed in Iraq, sued Phelps and his church for inflicting emotional distress on them by staging one of these notorious protests. The trial court found in favor of the Snyder family, but the WBC appealed. The case, Snyder v. Phelps, eventually reached the Supreme Court, which decided eight-to-one that the protests were protected by the First Amendment.

How could the court have reached such a decision? As a believer in God's infinite love, I feel sick typing the words that WBC members shout. I hate the pain those words cause to people who are already suffering. Yet I agree with the Supreme Court's decision. Freedom of speech is vital to our liberty, and it can only be fully protected if we tolerate speech we disagree with or even find loathsome.

The primary guardian of free speech in the United States is the First Amendment to the Constitution. However, free speech is not the only right listed in the amendment. The complete amendment states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Why are all of these rights bundled together? One reason is that that free speech supports the other rights listed. The freedom to express one's beliefs is vital to the exercise of religion. A religion confined to the inside of a person's head or even the inside of a church is not free. Free exercise of religion requires the ability to express out loud, in public, principles with which other people may disagree.

The same reasoning applies to the other First Amendment freedoms. Without freedom of speech, there would be nothing for a "free press" to print. How could people petition the government to redress their grievances if criticizing the government were prohibited? Why bother to assemble, peaceably or otherwise, if the opinions we assemble to express are prohibited? Our other, vital freedoms rest on a foundation of free speech.

In the words of author Salman Rushdie, a man whose life has been threatened because of his speech, "One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting." Speech that offends no one needs no protection. If we try to shut down speech that we disagree with or ideas that offend us, we put our own rights in danger.

To begin, there is no limit to what may offend and who may be offended. One might expect that a woman of color who had escaped an oppressive, patriarchal religion that mutilated her body and forced her into an arranged marriage, a woman who has since devoted her life to denouncing and fighting women's oppression, would be a hero on an American college campus. But unfortunately for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the religion she escaped and now criticizes was not Christianity but Islam. So in 2014, when Brandeis University planned to present Ms. Ali with an honorary doctorate degree, protests by Muslim student organizations were enough to cause the university to withdraw the honor and rescind the invitation for Ms. Ali to speak.

Universities aren't the only place free speech is threatened. The "speech codes" too prevalent on campus today reflect frequent calls in the broader culture to criminalize "hate speech." In countries such as the United Kingdom, laws forbid speech that disparages people based on personal characteristics such as ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation and that may incite discrimination or violence against them. Not surprisingly, this has resulted in people being prosecuted for expressing religious views that condemn, for example, homosexuality. According to columnist Charles C. W. Cooke, "In 2002, evangelist Harry Hammond was ordered to pay a total of £695 for displaying a banner that read, 'Jesus Gives Peace, Jesus Is Alive, Stop Immorality, Stop Homosexuality, Stop Lesbianism, Jesus is Lord.' In 2006, Stephen Green was arrested in Wales after distributing Christian pamphlets that called homosexuality 'a sin,' and in 2010, a Christian preacher in Cumbria was arrested for preaching the same message on the street."

Up to this point, such laws have been repeatedly struck down by the Supreme Court. This is heartening, but defenders of free speech shouldn't assume that there is no threat. There is no such thing as a permanent Supreme Court decision, and justices often look to the culture as much as to the Constitution when making judgments. If we ignore attempts to limit speech based on its offensive content, we face the possibility that some future Supreme Court will discover that "hate speech" laws were constitutional all along. If that happens, freedom of religion and of the press should feel the cold breeze on their own skin.

Some may ask if there are, then, no permissible restrictions on free speech. That is certainly not the case. Constitutionally valid restrictions fall primarily into three types: laws against true threats and direct incitement to violence; laws regarding the time, place, and manner of public protests; and restrictions imposed by the owners of private property. These limitations strike a necessary balance between the demands of public safety and the demands of free speech.

When we encounter ideas with which we disagree, we are free to argue back. But if we insist that the opponent stop talking, there's no reason for him not to insist that we shut up as well. British philosopher Julian Baggini expressed this when he said, "You should protest about the views of people you disagree with over major moral issues, and argue them down, but you should not try to silence them, however repugnant you find them. That is the bitter pill free speech requires us to swallow."

The modern world is full of voices, shouting their opinions. We meet them every time we turn on the television, open a newspaper, or log in to Facebook or Twitter. It may irritate us at times, but it is also an expression of something truly beautiful. In the United States of America, we are free—free to believe, free to worship, free to print newspapers and write blogs, free to assemble and petition, and free to say what we like about all of it.