We value free speech very highly in this country, but it isn’t an absolute. There are limits to free speech.
There’s also a distinction in American law between restrictions the government can place on speech, and restrictions other people can place on speech. So, while the government might not be able to fire somebody for being a communist, a private firm could.
We’ve recently seen many serious attacks on free speech — mostly from the woke left. People lose their jobs and their livelihoods because they dare to say something the woke mob disagrees with.
(For the record, in the past we’ve seen similar threats from the right.)
For some inexplicable reason, we’ve allowed this to happen without challenge.
I think it’s fairly obvious that there is a range of opinions people should be able to express without fear of retaliation, and there are other opinions that are unacceptable in civilized society. For example, it’s no longer acceptable to advocate slavery.
The problem we’re struggling with is how to define the boundaries. What opinions are acceptable, and what are unacceptable?
If you listen to the woke mob, anything they’ve decided to reject in the last five minutes is a hanging offense. This is clearly madness. It puts whoever can make a stink on Twitter in the driver’s seat.
Still, there needs to be some sort of standard. It needs to be relatively objective, and it needs to respect free speech as well as evolving standards of decency. There are things that were acceptable to say in 1720 that are no longer acceptable.
Here’s an idea for how to do that.
Let’s say we pick a group of people who are believed to be representatives of decent society.
- Supreme Court justices (federal and state)
- Senators
- Governors
- Tenured professors at major universities
Imagine that we establish a rule that if you say something that is consistent with what 2 or 3 of those folks have said in the past five years, you’re in the clear. You can’t be fired for expressing such a view.
In time, everyone in the culture would learn to understand and respect that as the acceptable bounds of free speech.
There would have to be some tinkering here. For example, even if three Senators say that Google is a horrible stain on America, Google should still be able to fire employees who say that. So the lawyers will have to adjust things a bit.
But I think that something along these general lines could be adopted as a standard for free speech. It respects the voice of the people — since they elect governors and Senators — and it would define what “reasonable speech” means, and provide a safe haven for it. It would also place a limit on unreasonable speech, and allow for evolving standards of decency.