Once again an ACLU spokesperson ("Sticks, Stones, and Free Speech,"  Fall 1984) assures us that the First Amendment creates and protects a right to do wrong. In our society women, not men, are routinely assaulted, beaten and sexually abused with impunity. Female rape occurs every seven minutes, we are told. Yet the ACLU upholds the "right' of some individuals and firms to produce and sell literature and movies that suggest and promote this very thing. The ACLU calls this sordid business, conducted for commercial profit, free speech. 

The word speech does not refer to one-way communication. It means, just as it did in colonial times, the willing interchange of spoken words, and only then when those words are related to the civil discourse necessary to maintain and improve our democratic system of government. In addition, freedom of speech is not freedom to speak. Speaking, said Alexander Meiklejohn, the revered civil libertarian, is subject to regulation as is shooting a gun. It is regulated in the legislatures, in the hearing rooms, and in the courts - everywhere the democratic process takes place. Unless speakers take turns, stick to the point, and avoid 
incivilities, there can be no free speech. 

The idea that constitutional free speech protects a right of one citizen or group as against another is absurd. The relationship envisioned in the First Amendment is that of the citizenry as against their self-created system of government. It is a political, not personal, relationship.

Louis W. Jones
 
 

2000