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Suing to Silence
Free Speech
Jeff Jacoby
What would happen if a powerful union sued a think tank for accurately quoting the
union's president in a letter to its supporters? Anyone who went to law school will
recognize that as the kind of far-fetched hypothetical that law professors dream up in
order to spark classroom discussion. But this is no hypothetical. |
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Practicing
Intellectual Virtue
Wendy McElroy
A good argument, as much as good meal, is one of the joys of living. The Intellectual
Virtues are meant to give you control of arguments, not to be used as a prudish rule book
that strips color from your conversations. |
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Be Not
Afraid
Justice Clarence Thomas
The insistence on civility in the form of our debates has the perverse effect of
cannibalizing our principles, the very essence of a civil society. That is why civility
cannot be the governing principle of citizenship or leadership. |
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Menacing
Speech,
Today and During the Civil Rights Movement
Pro-civil-rights violence is just as punishable as pro-life violence;
but pro-life speech must be just as protected as pro-civil-rights speech. |
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Must a Civil
Society be a Censored Society?
Hate-speech laws may be tempting in the battle against bigotry, but
they run afoul of individual liberty and First Amendment protections. |
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Media Out of Control
When propaganda is the goal, truth and rational thought are the first
casualties. |
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Civil
Rights' Trump Free Speech in Canada
Are human rights compatible with freedom of the press and other forms of
expression? |
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A
Hostile Environment for Free Speech
In America, we're free to express all sorts of opinions, good, bad,
and ugly. Some people may be offended, and quite rightly so. But the government has no
business outlawing such expression. |
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Court
Restrains HUD's Thought Police
The federal antidiscrimination juggernaut stumbled recently, tripped up by
an impediment called the First Amendment. |
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The Importance of Talk
Radio
"What has happened recently, and what has so unnerved the
liberals, is that talk radio has "gone national." Instead of local talk show
hosts commiserating with conservative insomniacs during the wee hours, Rush Limbaugh (and
others) are proclaiming well-informed conservative views in an entertaining format in
broad daylight to tens of millions of people." |
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The
Dehumanization of Dissent
"What is taking place is something far more serious than the
emergence of some new tolerance. Beliefs and values integral to our Judeo-Christian ethic
and Western civilization are not only being displaced but adjudged to have been medieval
and wicked." |
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"A century
or so from now, observers looking back on the 1990s will consider the advent of the
Internet and the World-Wide Web one of the great watersheds of history – comparable
technologically to the invention of movable type, artistically to the Renaissance, and
socially to the Declaration of Independence... Tens of thousands of creative network
citizens across the world are setting up their own information servers and joining the
Web. In the process, those net citizens are completely bypassing the Establishment with
its bureaucracies, class hierarchies, and power structures, not to mention the entire
monolithic apparatus of the traditional publishing industry!"
