The high court victory of a woman who declined to create a website promoting gay marriage affirmed the long-held tenet that the US government can’t force you to say things you don’t believe.
Jonathan Rieder spent his entire scholarly career researching racial conflict and the language we use to discuss race until Barnard College canceled one of his courses because of his approach to teaching about race.
Proponents of hate speech laws assume the enforcement of such laws might have prevented the spread of Nazi ideology in Germany, but the historical record belies this assumption.
Counterspeech is a shorthand term for any speech that seeks to counter or reduce the potential adverse impacts of hate speech or other controversial speech.
Shouting down a speaker to stop an event from proceeding is mob censorship, full stop. It gives the shouters the power to dictate what anyone else is able to say or to hear.
The question is not whether good speech always wins in the end, the question is what rights do we all have to our ideas and communications, and who gets the power to decide what is true and what is not.
