   Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
    Free-expression and freedom-of-speech are not the same thing. In America, no one has a right to total free-expression. What the constitution says is that,
    Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech…
     No accident that this is in the Bill of Rights; the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In America, freedom of speech is a right, privilege and a responsibility.
    Freedom-of-Speech protects citizens from government trying to silence a citizen’s expression of ideas and claims. Freedom of speech, however, protects no citizen from rebuttal from other citizens. So Freedom-of-Speech does not protect “free-expression†because free-expression does not require you to identify yourself. Free-expression does not even require that you stand by and represent your ideas. That’s why free-expression is almost always done unseen, in the shadows. Â
    The KKK wore hoods to hide their faces, and they only rode out at night. That shows you that free-expression is immature, and is the dark tunnel that immature citizens live in and prefer.
    Free-expression, you see, allows people to hide and not have their claims challenged. Freedom-of-Speech is a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. As with all other constitutional rights, then, Freedom-of-Speech is an American privilege and responsibility. So citizen, identify yourself and then speak so that other citizens may hear your claims, make judgments about your reasoning and the validity of what you say. In doing so, your fellow citizens may choose to use their Freedom-of-Speech to challenge your ideas.
    The mistake that Americans have been making lately is this one. For some reason we have been saying that since Americans have freedom of expression, there is nothing to be done. That is what some have said. So that’s why we sometimes end up with the odd situation that when someone makes ugly racial, anti-gay and lesbian, anti-some-group statements, people act as if there is nothing to be done.Â
    Not so because, we Americans have the right to Freedom-of-Speech. Lately, we have been acting as if we think that that freedom means that we have to shut up in the face of someone else’s ugly use of Freedom-of-Speech. No we don’t…
    No we don’t because no one has a right to free expression, we all have a right to freedom-of-speech. Â
  Starting at 8pm, Tuesday, August 16, 2011, on the campus of NCSU we had an event called “Respect the Pack.â€
 
    That event was put on to protest and challenge all the offensive, negative group-hate graffiti that shows up in the Free-Expression Tunnel. Our protest that night was significant.
    We were expressing our Freedom of Speech to say that we value each and every student on our campus.
      We were expressing our Freedom of Speech to say that when someone writes racial graffiti, that does not reflect the opinion of the whole campus.Â
    We recognize, you see, that the hate of a group expressed in graffiti is really an attack on students of all racial and religious stripes because it shows that there is intolerance and hate on our campus. Who wants to live in a place like that? How can a person go home and proclaim their pride in being a student at a place that is so hateful?
     When we recognize and understand that one person’s freedom-of-speech does not negate other Americans’ freedom-of-speech that means there is something to be done. That means we can raise our voices in opposition to group-hate.
August 26th, 2011 at 2:21 AM
Very interesting points. Thanks!
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August 29th, 2011 at 2:51 AM
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