A recent
poll of college students’ attitudes toward free speech (in general and on campus) is a mixed bag.
The survey by McLaughlin & Associates for the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale shows that 87% of respondents agreed with this statement: “There is educational value in listening to and understanding views and opinions that I may disagree with and are different from my own.”
That’s good news that runs counter to the narrative that campuses have been seized by a speech-stultifying political correctness.
On the other hand, 21% students -- and 30% of self-described liberals -- agreed with the statement that the 1st Amendment was an “outdated amendment that can no longer be applied in today’s society and should be changed.”
Also remarkable was the fact that 35% of respondents agreed that “hate speech is NOT protected under the 1st Amendment.”
When the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper at Williams College
recanted an
editorial that had suggested that “some speech is too harmful to invite to campus,” she added this qualification: “Students should not face restrictions in terms of the speakers they bring to campus, provided of course that these speakers do not participate in forms of legally recognized hate speech.”
The problem is that there is no such thing.
As Eugene Volokh of UCLA law school
pointed out on his blog in the Washington Post: “Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the 1st Amendment as other ideas. One is as free to condemn Islam — or Muslims, or Jews, or blacks, or whites, or illegal aliens, or native-born citizens — as one is to condemn capitalism or Socialism or Democrats or Republicans.”
(Volokh’s parenthesis about “whatever exactly that might mean” points to a different issue: the
defining down of the word “hate.” Opposing same-sex marriage, a position embraced not that long ago by President Obama, is sometimes
viewed as anti-gay hate speech. So is criticism of the Catholic Church.
Bill Donohue of the Catholic League asserted that a Jon Stewart skit involving a Nativity scene "ranks with the most vulgar expression of hate speech ever aired on television.")
So where does the idea that the 1st Amendment doesn’t protect hate speech come from?
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