Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> Discriminations

Legal Commentary

: Discriminations

Will On Wayward Liberals

In his Washington Post column this morning George Will writes:

For several decades, most of the ingenuity that liberal academics have invested in First Amendment analysis has aimed to justify limiting the core activity that the amendment was written to protect ? political speech. These analyses treat free speech as not an inherent good but as a merely instrumental good, something justified by serving other ends ? therefore something to be balanced against, and abridged to advance, other goods.

?So,? Will continues, ?political speech is not a right but a privilege, something granted by government when government deems it consistent? with other needs and goals. Read the whole column.

Will may be right that ?most of the ingenuity that liberal academics have invested in First Amendment analysis has aimed to justify? the government?s desire to regulate and restrict political speech, but not all of it. Some of that liberal ingenuity has also been invested in devising ways to allow governments to limit non-political speech, such as ?hate speech? and pornography.

And, of course, it?s true that not all the ingenuity of liberal academics has been devoted to developing innovative arguments to limit speech. A great deal of it, perhaps more, has been devoted to equally innovative arguments justifying the government?s ability to distribute benefits and burdens based on race, i.e., defending ?diversity,? denigrating colorblind neutrality.

For almost the entirety of its history in this country liberalism has stood proudly and firmly in favor of free speech and colorblind racial equality. This generation of liberals, however, has discarded both of those principles and now spends most of its academic time inventing new ways of trashing them.

What a mess of liberalism they?ve made.

Full post as published by Discriminations on May 24, 2009 (boomark / email).