The Erosion of Free Speech
Speech has lost its meaning
Americans have a speech impediment. No, it’s more accurate to say that American speech has been impeded. With political divide comes a split in the meanings of words. Democrats and Republicans police language in different ways, but they’ve both contributed to the degradation of our speech’s meaning. When everyone tries to keep each other from speaking, speech loses all its power, depth and purpose.
From Jimmy Kimmel to Van Jones, the words they say, however offensive they may or may not be, don’t carry any weight. With everybody trying to decide for each other what should and shouldn’t be said, we believe that speech, particularly free speech, has been eroded into meaninglessness.
The line between what is protected speech and what is hate speech has never been more blurred. “Dog whistles,” coded messages, and symbols meant to stir hatred, have invaded the realm of speech.
What may seem like a normal, if not controversial, statement may be a camouflaged directive of hate because of dog whistles. It begs the question of what our country must protect and what it must fight against regarding speech and language.
We believe that our country should fight against speech and speakers that spread messages of hate, violence, incitement and intolerance. The protection of this language is one of the reasons why speech has been eroded to this point. The line, we believe, is between speech that incites hate—the speech mentioned above—and words that offend people or hurt their feelings. Anyone can be offended by anything making it an ineffectual method of speech protection.
Our time is one of a growth in progressivism and tolerance. Yet, we are far from where we should be. Unlocking the power of speech to fight hate and drive progress will get us there. Progress will defeat hate when the power of the English language is restored to its proper form.
When speech is turned into a weapon against hate we will all be freer. Instead of fighting specific words we should fight hate speech in general. We do not need to lobotomize our language, but we must get to the root of hate speech and pull it out like a weed. The longer both sides point the finger at each other, the longer we go without making progress, the longer hate is protected.
We believe that speech has been eroded to the point that words have lost their meaning and hate speech has toed the line between protected and unprotected language. This is not a battle of words; it’s a war between decency and intolerance. Americans will lose this battle unless they take back the English language and use it to fight hate and intolerance.