OK, lots of reasons. But this article from the NY Times is really important to me. I am a First Amendment purist. With the “yelling fire in a crowded theater” exception (legally referred to as imminent violence) excluded, I believe that people should be legally allowed to say whatever stupid, hateful, awful thing they want.
I believe firmly in the marketplace of ideas. Stupid ideas need to be out in the open where they can be publicly mocked. I don’t believe that there should be no consequences to saying stupid, hateful, awful things (you might get fired, mocked, posted on YouTube, etc.), I just think it shouldn’t be illegal.
As a counter example, many countries have laws against denying the Holocaust. The Holocaust was unbelievably horrible and I understand that denying it can be hurtful to many people. But at the end of the day, to me it’s like saying the moon landings were fake or the Earth is flat. Intelligent people should be able to just dismiss it as folly. And when the government steps in to make it illegal, it actually creates more conspiracy theories and gives the stupidity more credence (what are they hiding? etc.).
A long time ago a very liberal magazine in Madison, Wisconsin (most liberal city in Wisconsin – Texans should think Austin) tried to publish an article that tried to explain the science behind the H-Bomb. This was in 1979, still cold war era. The author was an anti-nuclear weapons person largely criticizing the government for crazy secrecy (his main point being, if I can figure this out it’s not a secret so the government is clearly going crazy making things classified).
In one of the few examples of “prior restraint” on a news organization, the government prevented publication of this article. On appeal, the case began to unravel as it became clear that this information was in the public domain (a student’s encyclopedia already had presented it). The article was eventually published. You can get all of this information on Wikipedia.
Now, was it smart to write this article? Was it a good thing? Highly debatable. But at the time the government was more bent out of shape about this than anything we’ve seen lately in our terrorism conscious country. They took the almost unheard of step of preventing publication. Yet historically this was a complete non-event.
So ultimately my opinion is that the world can handle ideas and information, even stupid, dangerous, misguided ones. Trying to hide them doesn’t work. Uncovering and dispelling them does.
And this is fundamentally baked into our country’s DNA. Even when it makes us really uncomfortable. A big reason why our country rocks…
Steve Fischer's Random Blog 