Free speech rights mustn’t be sacrificed

Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of any free society.

Constitutional protections help shield Americans from governments that might otherwise be keen to curb the ability of dissidents to push back on the state (rightly or wrongly — it doesn’t matter).

And a general culture of free speech has allowed for America to be a place where perspectives of all sorts can be heard, read and shared.

It’s a freedom many Americans take for granted. But it shouldn’t be. Around the world, the ability to communicate what one thinks and believes can result in not just social sanction but the heavy hand of state punishment.

From the brutal controls of free speech in Communist China and North Korea to the criminalization of real or perceived “hate speech” in much of the Western world, freedom of speech as Americans understand it is uniquely protected here.

Illiberal impulses to chip away at freedom of speech must be resisted. And among younger Americans in particular, there seems to be a lack of education about the value of free speech.

A recent poll from Newsweek that found that 44% of 25- to 34-year-olds believe that “referring to someone by the wrong gender pronoun (he/him, she/her) should be a criminal offense.”

By contrast, just 19% of Americans overall agree that “misgendering” should be a crime. As Reason Magazine’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown correctly explains, “Calling people by their preferred pronouns is certainly the kind thing to do, just as it is to call people by their preferred name or honorific. Conversely, deliberately misgendering someone is a jerk move. But the purpose of criminal law isn’t to punish people for being jerks, and it’s a perverted society that thinks everything offensive or bad must be criminalized.”

That’s right. It’s one thing to dislike or disagree with certain speech, it’s another to want to bring in the state to criminally punish those you disagree with simply for expressing their disagreement.

In a free society — and yes, America is still mostly a free society — disagreements should be subject to debate, even enthusiastic and contentious debate. But it’s important for Americans to avoid succumbing to authoritarian fantasies of jailing those they don’t agree with.