TJV
Lifelong Packers Fanatic
- Joined
- Feb 22, 2011
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The freedom we enjoy as Americans is of course precious and I hope everyone has that uppermost in mind in early November of this year. But our freedom is not absolute. The First Amendment protects our right to freely exercise our religious beliefs but not absolutely: Those whose religions allow plural marriage are not free to practice polygamy. The freedom of the press isn’t absolute either as there are laws against libel. We have the right to peaceably assemble and petition the Government for a redress of grievances but laws against sedition are constitutional.
Neither is our freedom of speech absolute. As recently as 1969 the Supreme Court refined the test for exclusions to our freedom of speech. If speech is intended to incite violence or harm and if that violence or harm is immanent and likely, it is not constitutionally protected. So yelling fire in a crowded theater if the yeller knows there is no fire, is not protected speech. Of course if no one is harmed, it wouldn’t get into the court system but harm is not an element of test, only the immanent likelihood of harm. Obscenity and “incitement to crime” are also exceptions to freedom of speech.
Another exception is “fighting words”. This is a quote from Chaplinsky v.New Hampshire, a Supreme Court decision decided in 1942:
As I said the freedoms we enjoy as citizens of the United States are precious and they are unsurpassed in world history. They just aren’t absolute.
Neither is our freedom of speech absolute. As recently as 1969 the Supreme Court refined the test for exclusions to our freedom of speech. If speech is intended to incite violence or harm and if that violence or harm is immanent and likely, it is not constitutionally protected. So yelling fire in a crowded theater if the yeller knows there is no fire, is not protected speech. Of course if no one is harmed, it wouldn’t get into the court system but harm is not an element of test, only the immanent likelihood of harm. Obscenity and “incitement to crime” are also exceptions to freedom of speech.
Another exception is “fighting words”. This is a quote from Chaplinsky v.New Hampshire, a Supreme Court decision decided in 1942:
http://www.freedomforum.org/packages/first/fightingwords/casesummaries.htm#chaplinskyThere are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or "fighting words" those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.
As I said the freedoms we enjoy as citizens of the United States are precious and they are unsurpassed in world history. They just aren’t absolute.