Free Speech Is A Primary Liberal Value

Your right to speak doesn’t mean you have a right to an involuntary audience.

Photo by Gama. Films on Unsplash

Written By: James Peron

There is a simple question people put forth: “Do you support free speech or not? Yes or no?”

The traditional liberal would immediately say yes. It’s been something freedom advocates have often enunciated.

British Liberal Charles Bradlaugh stated, “Without free speech no search for Truth is possible.” American abolitionist Frederick Douglass argued, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” America’s first president, George Washington, warned: “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”

Certainly, free speech is a primary liberal value. As a basic answer “yes” is the correct answer but the problem is the question doesn’t reflect the complexity of reality. An answer to the more complex nature of the question must be more nuanced. Nuanced answers are based on fact but facts change from one situation to another.

It helps to state some basic principles. Free speech is your right to express your thoughts or values as you wish using your own property and resources or those voluntarily provided to you. If you want to preach a sermon in your church or one open for you that’s fine. If, on the other hand, you wish to do it on my property without my permission it is not allowed.

All rights are contingent on one important proviso: you are free to exercise you right provided you respect the equal rights of others; your right to speak doesn’t mean you have a right to an involuntary audience. You can speak on your own TV show but I have the right to change channels. You can write a book but I don’t have to buy one. Just as you are free to speak or not, others are free to listen or not.

You can’t force me to listen or to let you use my property. Some years back I got into a discussion with Nat Hentoff during the time the racist nationalist Ku Klux Klan wanted to pass out propaganda inside a shopping mall. The mall owners were not willing for this to happen.

Hentoff was inclined to allow it on the basis that shopping malls were more like the old public commons and the Klan had free speech rights. I asked him if I had to allow bigots to use my bookstore anytime they wanted. He answered, “No.” I even asked if I was so obligated if I owned several stores in a row. He said I wasn’t.

What if I put an awning over the sidewalk? No, he said. He realised the illustration I gave was now a short step from being a shopping mall and he told me he couldn’t really answer the question. But the best answer, I thought, was the owner decides if their private property is a community commons or not.

In the US state of Ohio one John Freshwater was hired to teach science at a local school. He was paid for that job, but instead he chose to preach religion and teach theology to students. When it came to the science of sexual orientation he explicitly told students to ignore the science and accept his religious theory instead. He even told students Catholics aren’t really Christian and used his position to distribute Bibles.

The common defence by Religious Right groups was this was an example of freedom of speech. But when you are hired to do one thing, but instead do another, it’s breach of contract and the school had every right to fire Freshwater and hire another individual to actually teach science. It wasn’t about free speech, even if he pretended it was.

In England one Pauline Howe went on a crusade against gay people. She wanted her local council to ban Pride events and strip way speech rights. She herself went to the event to tell participants they are offensive to God and to hand out some strident literatures to participants. She asserted her free speech rights but complained to the council that the people she confronted “were in our faces with aggressive verbal abuse.” She asserted a right to speak but denied others had a right to speak back. Winston Churchill once said of this phenomenon: “Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.”

Speech rights are limited by the equal rights of others. That means others have a right to deny you access to their property, they have a right to expect you to do the job for which you were hired and not as your personal pulpit, and that your rights are no different than the rights of anyone else. If you have the right to speak, they have the right to respond under those same rules.

James Peron has written for multiple publications and is the author of several books, including Exploding Population Myths and The Liberal Tide. James is an Associate of the Free Market Foundation.