Philly buses ordered to accept ads featuring Hitler & 1941 Palestinian leader

[Warren DeMontague]

52. Again, I don't think you really understand the 1st Amendment.

Holocaust Denial is protected by the 1st Amendment. Saying "lynching is okay" is also protected by the 1st Amendment.

That does not mean those are admirable pieces of speech, however, they are absolutely protected speech.

Beating Hindi, or Sikh IIRC, men for wearing turbans after 9-11 was a crime. However, that was not "speech", it was assault.

"speech inciting a hate crime" is an essentially meaningless distinction, and certainly not one which would fly in a US court of law. Someone could issue pro-holocaust literature in a Jewish Neighborhood- they would be an asshole, but they would still have the right to issue whatever literature they wanted. They could not, of course, vandalize a synagogue, but again, that is a separate crime and quite different from 'issuing literature' . Threatening someone, burning a cross on their lawn, etc- not protected... but simply being an asshole or a bigot, even one who spreads hateful or violent ideology, is not by itself illegal.

For me- and I had relatives in those camps, by the way- this is not an "empty abstraction" argument at all. I see the principle of free speech and the 1st Amendment as one of the greatest bulwarks against the sort of totalitarianism the Nazis represented, that we have. The principle is far more crucial than people doing away with speech they don't like. Free speech is ONLY as good as the right of the most noxious speech to be heard.