A Quote by S.E. Cupp
Conservatives should defend free speech - but we must not amplify it when it's blatantly grotesque.
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Liberals shouldn't cede the responsibility to defend free speech on college campuses to conservatives. After all, without free speech, what's liberalism about?
Very often in free speech cases you find yourself defending material that you personally detest, because of course it's no trick to defend the free speech of people you either agree with or who don't particularly upset you. It's when people really upset you that you discover if you believe in free speech or not.
The intelligent defense of free speech should not rest on the notion that we must tolerate every form of speech, no matter how offensive. It's that we should lean toward greater tolerance for speech we dislike, and reserve our harshest penalties only for the worst offenders.
We civilians defend our own right to free speech. The military in Iraq does not defend our right to free speech.
I prefer a little free speech to no free speech at all; but how many have free speech or the chance or the mind for it; and is not free speech here as elsewhere clamped down on in ratio of its freedom and danger?
But we either believe in democracy or we don't. If we do, then, we must say categorically, without qualification, that no restraint from the any democratic processes, other than by the ordinary law of the land, should be allowed. If you believe in democracy, you must believe in it unconditionally. If you believe that men should be free, then, they should have the right of free association, of free speech, of free publication. Then, no law should permit those democratic processes to be set at nought.
It's always easy to get people to condemn threats to free speech when the speech being threatened is speech that they like. It's much more difficult to induce support for free speech rights when the speech being punished is speech they find repellent.
Conservatives who defend libertinism as liberty misunderstand what our Founding Fathers meant. We all love freedom. But freedom has a higher purpose, as should conservatives.
When you read the Oath of Office, to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, we should be supportive of people's rights, their right of free speech.
If someone offends you by speech, you must learn to defend yourself by speech.
Shutting down conservatives has become de rigueur. But now anti-free-speech activists are increasingly turning their ire on free-thinking progressives.
We're muddying the waters when we are having a discussion about what's going on on YouTube and Twitter and whether that's a matter of free speech. These are private platforms and they're allowed to decide what should and should not be on its platforms. It's not an issue of free speech.
I think that, especially among conservatives, there's a clear understanding that there are three legs to the conservative stool. There are the free-market economics conservatives, the social conservatives, and the national-security conservatives.
People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.
There are certain things you must not say in spite of the fact that supposedly democracy means free speech. No. You are not allowed free speech. If you speak freely, you are then deemed as I was, to be a subversive.
Democratization is not democracy; it is a slogan for the temporary liberalization handed down from an autocrat. Glasnost is not free speech; only free speech, constitutionally guaranteed, is free speech.
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