Title: Yes, freedom of speech should be absolute - spiked
Headings: Yes, freedom of speech should be absolute
Yes, freedom of speech should be absolute
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Content: That’s an act which undermines the principles of a justice system and makes it unworkable – there is no freedom to lie under oath. Likewise, telling someone to kill someone, while pressing a gun into the palm of their hand, is not an act of free speech; it’s incitement to murder. Incredible as it might seem, it is possible to defend free speech absolutely without defending perjury or incitement to murder (clue: these are not issues of free speech). Hence the architects of the Bill or Rights felt no need to add in caveats to that effect – because neither they nor the citizens they represented were idiots. But the majority of those who accompany their profession of support for free speech with a whole raft of anti-free-speech qualifications do so for subtler reasons. They emphasise the harm that speech can do. They talk, as one columnist did recently, of ‘issues of security and personal safety, of the value of truth and honesty, the need to treat others with respect’. Or, as another columnist did, they warn of the dangerous influence of certain speech: ‘