Sunday, April 20, 2014

XKCD on Free Speech

free_speech

I think xkcd gets this one right.

I once had someone tell me how ironic it was that tea party people were using their free speech to protest that they don’t have free speech. This person seemed to think that freedom of speech is the freedom to say something at all. Anything less than taping your mouth shut is not a violation of free speech – because that was really something they were worried about. After all, the tea party people were able to say something and therefore they have freedom of speech, how very ironic.

It seems to me that free speech has to mean all free speech or some free speech. If it means some free speech, then which speech? How do we determine? The mechanism by which we decide would be the same mechanism we would if we didn’t have a constitutional protection of free speech at all. It amounts to freedom of speech protecting only the speech they’ve decided not to regulate, which is no protection at all.

It is like if I promised that I will protect you whenever you are not in harm.