Bad Arguments for Limiting Speech

In a Washington Post op-ed titled “Why America Needs a Hate Speech Law,” Richard Stengel, who once edited Time, begins by recalling, “When I was a journalist, I loved Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s assertion that the Constitution and the First Amendment are not just about protecting ‘free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.’”

But a three-year stint at the State Department caused him to rethink his views. “I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier,” he explained this week. “Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why, they asked me, would you ever want to protect that? It’s a fair question.”

I’m not sure it is a fair question. It seems unfair for diplomats from a region where merely being Sunni or Shia or Kurdish or Christian or Jewish, or departing from the al-Qaeda or ISIS interpretation of the Koran, may be enough to put you in mortal danger, to criticize the speech liberties that Americans enjoy.

And it seems derelict for a U.S. diplomat to fail to defend the Bill of Rights to foreign counterparts, who should be perfectly capable of grasping that protecting all speech, however offensive, is one sure way of preventing grave infringements on liberty.