Jason Pye – It is chilling how the Congress can place restrictions on speech despite the Founders desire to protect political or even unpopular speech.

Well, the Founding Fathers would never have had those silly desires if they’d understood (as we now do) the concept of “hate speech”, how terrible it is, and how it is an absolute societal imperative to stamp it out.

/ sarc

While I’m not happy to see the power of the government misused to stifle free speech, the fact of the matter is that such misuse has a lengthy pedigree in our country, ranging from the Alien and Sedition Acts to HUAC to hate crimes.  When we all agree that SOME limits on free speech are OK in the interests of protecting the public, then we are effectively agreeing that ANY limits are OK.

I think we all agree that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, but the problem is that what one person or group thinks is suicidal, another person or group thinks is both good and necessary.  Perhaps in a generation or two, educated Americans* will look back at our hate laws and idiocy like McCain-Feingold, shake their heads, and wonder how we could have so foolishly abused the First Amendment (while, ironically, they are abusing it in some other way).

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(*) Yes, I know: it is foolishly optimistic to assume that there will be any Americans at all, much less educated Americans, in the future, but a guy can hope, can’t he?