Sorry Europe, when it comes to freedom of speech, America beats us again.

In another thread, ACIN gave me a link to the American Library Association. I dug around a little, and found this:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.

Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

---

Mind-blowing and beautiful, and the best comment on free speech I have heard so far in my life.


LONG LIVE THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT

Then ponder this again: "that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government." It implies that the people are sufficiently educated on political issues by means of public debate, and that this is an absolute requirement for the American government to function as designed.

Free speech is not a right without obligations; here there is a duty of informed debate conferred with it. Or to turn it upside down: You get free speech because in order for the American government to work as intended, it needs the American people to be able to make decisions based on informed, public debate.

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One is not reading them"--Misattributed to Ray Bradbury