Per the Nazis v. Skokie case, the 1st Amendment protects the right to engage in hateful speech. There's no serious debate that this law is unconstitutional and the politicians who supported it showed that they either don't understand the 1st Amendment or just don't care about it.
Since it also needs to be said, the fact that you have a constitutional right to say hateful things does not mean you should or that you have a right not to be judged by other people if you choose to exercise this particular right. As long as people are free to express views that almost everybody regards as reprehensible, the rest of us can feel confident that our 1st Amendment rights remain secure.
- "either don't understand the 1st Amendment or just don't care about it"
And, transitively, don't understand or care about their civic duty to uphold and promote those values, as elected leaders. It's not a "no-op" to pass an unconstitutional law that's immediately struck down by courts. It's an erosion of norms. The norm that elected leaders uphold the constitutional order, which constrains their power; and don't seek to break out of it. The norm that the system of freedom we live under is an expensive and valuable thing (and that this is a universally shared value); not something cheap and haggle-able.
>The norm that elected leaders uphold the constitutional order, which constrains their power; and don't seek to break out of it.
Let's be real: When has that /ever/ been the norm?
Anyone who chooses to pursue an office in governance is there to grab power or enrich themselves. No exceptions. The only question is how brazen they are about it.
> Let's be real: When has that /ever/ been the norm?
Every one of them swears an oath to uphold the US constitution. The sad thing is that their civic knowledge is so limited that few of them understand the principles they are proclaiming to serve by.
The exception is George Washington, who refused to become dictator, willingly limited the power of the Presidency, eschewed grandiose terms like "your Excellency", and left after two terms saying that was enough.
Sortition is one of those idea that when I was a young man I thought was dumb, but the older I get the more I realize elections end up with someone stupid or corrupt anyway so we me as well get a random sample of the populace to round things out.
Sadly the two party elected system is probably one of those things that is difficult to impossible to break out of, as the parties will never vote to suicide themselves.
To paraphrase Frank Herbert, it's not that power corrupts, but rather that the corruptible seek power. This is also a problem with revolutionary movements. Who gets to be in charge if you win? Odds are someone who ends up using the revolution to get power.
It's actually pretty easy to break out of, historically two party democracies aren't very common. Just need a war or revolution. Now breaking it out of it without majorly messing up things for a lot of the populace, that's a little harder, but once things are already pretty awful for 98% of people a revolution starts being more realistic
Sortition was one of those things I also thought was dumb until I worked in Federal Government and was "graced" on a few occassions by elected and designated officials. I soon realized that any random person could mostly do just as well, if not better.
I mean really, you think nobody has ever seen something and said "That is wrong" (whether it was wrong or not is another matter) and then decided to run for public office to make things right? Whether they get corrupted afterwards is another issue.
Frankly it's ideas like this that normalize grabbing power and enriching yourself.
>the 1st Amendment protects the right to engage in hateful speech.
It's worth going further to point out that the First Amendment (and Free Speech protections in general) exists specifically to protect and guarantee speech that someone sometime somewhere might or will find objectional for any or no reason.
Non-objectional speech doesn't need Free Speech protections because there's nobody to censor non-objectional speech in the first place.
Such an absolutely basic thing and yet notable and increasing numbers of Americans don't seem to grasp this or are downright hostile to it now. Some strange mindfog going around convincing people these concepts are held dear by "Republicans" and therefore bad.
I never would have imagined a few short years ago we'd be here.
You’d think the population would be moving the opposite way when you look at the UK and see people being arrested for rude tweets. Or that one UK woman arrested because the police suspected she controlled an account which posted a mean post on kiwifarms (she didn’t, and the police had no evidence to begin with).
Most Americans probably either don't care or fundamentally disagree with the right of Nazis to say shit, but the legal system prioritizes consistency and their specific brand of morality over the public desire, that's why we have law and not chaotic lynch mobs.
But there is no "benefit" to unfettered free speech other than the fact that we have unfettered free speech; it's very straightforward. Some people won't care about it.
The benefit is we find solutions to objectionable ideas by discussing them. The alternative is a chilling effect where people are hesitant to discuss problems for fear of getting into trouble for even coming close to saying the illegal thing.
The benefit is to deprive the government of the power to decide which speech is allowed, which will likely depend on which party is in power, and how the cultural winds are blowing. Which might be in your preferred flavor today, but not tomorrow. If you're a progressive, do you really want to risk curtailing speech on the possibility that religious conservatives will get a chance to wield that power? We've seen what that's like in the past.
> they either don't understand the 1st Amendment or just don't care about it
I figure they know it is unconstitutional and will be overturned by the courts, but they will still get brownie points from their supporters for trying.
> Since it also needs to be said, the fact that you have a constitutional right to say hateful things does not mean you should or that you have a right not to be judged by other people if you choose to exercise this particular right.
This is the interesting part of the debate. It is commonly stated that freedom of speech doesn’t equal freedom from consequences, and it’s hard to imagine a law that could guarantee anyone freedom from the consequences of their speech, but is there a point where the consequences become disproportionate?
The first amendment only limits government, but there are private entities which have government-like powers in some circumstances. For example, the church. Historically if you said something the church didn’t like, you might risk shunning, or worse. People have lost livelihoods and been shut out of civic society for using speech in opposition to religious authority. Is that a legitimate and proportionate consequence of speech?
The church in America is in decline, but religiosity has found new homes amongst political mobs, who can wield their powers against free speech. They can put pressure on the private companies that act as the government of the internet. All while acting in a private, non-governmental capacity, so it’s not censorship, it’s just consequences, right?
Should we seek to limit the consequences that churches can impose?
> It is commonly stated that freedom of speech doesn’t equal freedom from consequences,
Like many commonly stated things, this is completely wrong. Freedom from consequences is the only possible thing that "freedom of speech" could mean. Essentially every living person has some way of communicating and so if freedom of speech weren't freedom from consequences, then every living person has freedom of speech definitionally. "Freedom of speech" wouldn't mean anything then. Persons living under the most oppressive regime would, by this flawed definition, have perfect freedom of speech.
The common but wrong idea stems from fundamentally confusing "freedom of speech" and "the first amendment to the United States Constitution". What it's attempting to say is that the 1A doesn't guarantee that purely private actors can't find a way to penalize you for your speech. However, what it gets wrong is that such penalties would still be an abrogation of freedom of speech, but a kind of freedom of speech which isn't protected by 1A. Just because that kind of freedom of speech [against private actors] isn't guaranteed by 1A, doesn't mean it's not valuable. Many of us believe this kind of freedom of speech is also valuable.
Since it also needs to be said, the fact that you have a constitutional right to say hateful things does not mean you should or that you have a right not to be judged by other people if you choose to exercise this particular right. As long as people are free to express views that almost everybody regards as reprehensible, the rest of us can feel confident that our 1st Amendment rights remain secure.