By Martin Hackworth

I’ve spent a lot of time through the years defending free speech. The best cure for an exercise of poor speech, I’ve long maintained, is an exercise of better speech. Lately I’m not so sure. Given that the right of free speech seems abused more than not, maybe we ought to think about the entire concept. Perhaps we are, as a culture, just not yet sufficiently mature for such a privilege.

Just recently I’ve encountered more than enough banal, hateful, stupid, deceitful and harmful abuse of free speech. A Facebook memorial for 6-year old Emilie Parker, who was killed in the Sandy Hook shootings, was vandalized by truthers and second amendment purists. Westboro Baptist Church is up to their antics again, picketing funerals of soldiers and memorial services for the victims of the Sandy Hook shootings. The anti-vaccination crowd are doing their mightiest to revisit plague and suffering on children everywhere, and to return us to that notably wonderful era in history, the middle ages. Noted geography and climate-change expert Sarah Palin, no longer a pundit, has not yet begun to fight. The foreign-born Muslim terrorist known as Barack Obama, who was illegitimately elected President of the United States by not once, but twice, by over 60 million voters, is coming for everyone’s guns. Bigfoot popped up in Oregon and is coming to a podiatry conference in New England. A University of Wisconsin student and Green Bay Packers cheerleader, Kaitlyn Collins, was ridiculed for her looks and taunted with graphic suggestions of sexual abuse by knuckleheads on a Chicago Bears fan site. On this last point, though I am no Packers fan, Kaitlyn Collins looks like a completely pleasant and wonderful young person to me. If Kaitlyn were my daughter, there might be a few Chicago Bears fans out there running around with a broken-off foot in their fannies. Free speech or no.