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: In short, it doesn’t contain caveats or exceptions. In the eyes of the Founding Fathers, people’s freedom to think what they choose to think, to believe what they choose to believe, and to say what they want to, was absolute – it brooked no compromise. And why were there none of the exceptions, or the caveats, or the famous ‘limits’ to free speech that we’d no doubt find if a Bill of Rights was drawn up to today? Because, quite simply, freedom of thought and speech was seen as something too important to be bounded or qualified. It wasn’t that someone like Thomas Jefferson, or Tom Paine, or Voltaire, not to mention the many others who breathed in the radical, liberty-thirsting air of the time, were unaware of malicious speech, or abusive speech, or even just plain idiotic speech. Not everyone was dead smart during the Age of Enlightenment. It’s just that at that moment freedom, and free speech, was seen in its positive aspect, as something that benefitted humankind, a principle that prevented a government from slipping towards tyranny, that allowed the ‘better angels of our nature’ to flourish, that aided the pursuit of truth. See, for instance, Madison’s criticisms of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1800 in which he drew on the First Amendment to defend the press’s right to be ‘seditious’, and made a case for ‘the intent to excite… unfavourable sentiments against those who administer the government’. For Madison, then, the freedom to lambast public figures, to excite others’ antagonism towards those figures – something that today would be classed as ‘incitement to hatred’ – was far more important than protecting those figures from emotional harm. The emphasis always fell on freedom of speech, and never its restriction.