| mrstickball said:
Furthermore, a person's free speech can be limited if they go far, even in the US - such as threatening another person with physical violence and the like. As an 18 year old, you may not understand why its important, but look at the countries that heavily censor speech. They always do so to shape the argument in an opportunistic fashion, and usually to promote governmental ideals, such as the Chinese or North Koreans. If someone spouts nonsense - say a racist - they do have to pay heavy social penalties for them. If a major business, sports, or political figure said something inherently racists, they would suffer for it. Todd Akin is suffering quite a bit from his abortion debacle. That is how free speech should work - you're allowed to say almost anything, but it can come at a cost if you're stupid. |
It's not about protecting certain groups, it's about protecting every single group you may think of. And I don't think assuming that social penalties will occur is fair enough towards the people that the offender did offend. They deserve concrete protection by law, in my opinion.
North Korea is not comparable to what we have here. They want to censor speech and political opinions, while we want to, and actually do, make it illegal to offend someone using speech. You can still say "fuck niggers", as long as it wasn't meant to offend someone. There are obviously certain cases where it's hard to tell if the purpose was to offend someone, but that's why we have the court.
Life isn't always fair, but allowing unfair things just because it sometimes is hard to see where the line goes makes no sense to me.
