Opinion: America has lost its historic free-speech consensus
noted, DeSantis “also sought to shut down a drag show, citing a 1947 legal precedent banning ‘men impersonating women’” and “has proposed to challenge the landmark Supreme Court decision on libel, narrowing the scope of press freedom.”
The classroom- and library-related restrictions are problematic, but at least deal with public agencies. It seems like a bizarre moral panic to ban people from participating in voluntary drag shows. Conservatives are pushing back against left-wing campus speech codes and “cancel culture” – with their own types of speech codes and cancelling criteria.
Frustrated at perceived bias within social-media companies, many Republicans have championed governmentranging from turning those private firms into regulated monopolies to removing their protections from defamation lawsuits. They claim these proposals will promote free speech – but they ultimately make government regulators the arbiter of speech, or eliminate the rights of private companies to set up their own moderating and publishing rules.
For instance, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down – on First Amendment grounds – California’s law forcing crisis-pregnancy centers to provide abortion information even though they exist to provide alternatives to abortion. A new bill uses false-advertising laws to achieve the same goal. “We are outlawing misinformation,” Assembly member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, D-Orinda, recently
the Sacramento Bee. Whatever one’s views on abortion, we should agree it is not government’s place to police the “truth.”
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