Limiting Free Speech. No Surprise Here.

By Rob Janicki

A new poll shows that a majority of Democrats want to limit free speech with laws that would prohibit so-called “hate speech.”

The YouGov poll published Wednesday found that 51 percent of Democrats favor imposing legal limits on free speech while just 26 percent of Democrats oppose the idea.

The problem, which is insurmountable in my opinion, is that hate speech and any other similar kind of speech, which liberals find distasteful or worse, is not defined and is completely subjective.  Under a mountain of legal decisions in all kinds of cases, benchmarks in law must be objective in nature for all parties to clearly understand and for which juries could reasonably find an outcome when called upon.  The law abhors subjectivity, since it mitigates against reason and logic, two things liberals find distasteful to their thinking and "feelings" of superiority. 

It's not surprising to anyone on the political right that liberals would want to try and legally restrict speech.  That just seems to be in the nature of liberals, especially when they are losing the battle of words and expression of ideas.  Essentially, to a liberal, any speech that opposes their political agenda is "hate" speech, a term which they have come to label speech they are opposed to.  Convenient.  Cast speech they disagree with, using a pejorative term like "hate" and half the battle for them is already won through an appeal to emotion.

The Founding Fathers, unlike our present day liberals, understood that there would be speech that was unpopular and sometimes downright objectionable to the sensibilities of many decent people.  Despite that, the Founding Fathers realized how important it was to protect all speech that did not engender either slander or libel, since the truth of a statement could be rationally determined without becoming filled with "touchy feely" emotional responses.  Restricting speech prejudges an outcome without going through any legal process once speech is subjectively defined as hateful or objectionable.

So, why are we hearing more about limiting free speech from liberals today?  The answer is relatively simple.  Liberals are beginning to lose the war of words.  Liberal progressivism may have reached its zenith.  More Americans are beginning to seriously question the role of government in their lives from birth to death.  The latest liberal attack on free speech appears to be coming from the likes of Hillary Clinton and the radical left wing of the Democrat Party.  I'm thinking it's based upon their fear of failure for liberals once again, this time in the very key presidential election of 2016.  Liberals were seriously crippled in the 2014 elections and are fearful of failing to recover from these loses in a generation or more.

The 1st Amendment protects all speech, but there is no doubt the left is increasingly comfortable with limiting this. Hillary Clinton has said that overturning Citizens United is a priority for her if elected President. That decision found that a film critical of Hillary could be shown on TV prior to an election. Hillary says she would support a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision. This week, she added that opposition to the case would be a litmus test for any Supreme Court Justices she would appoint.

A majority of Democrats already support limiting free speech. Imposing new limits to speech as a matter of law is already on the left’s agenda.