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Old 04-30-2014, 12:38 PM   #11
footfootfoot
To shreds, you say?
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: in the house and on the street-how many, many feet we meet!
Posts: 18,449
All that's left is a Banned of Gold.


And another thing about free speech, hate speech should not be protected speech. I guess this is a grey area, I assumed it fell under fighting words, but ti just misses.

eta:
Quote:
Some limits on expression were contemplated by the framers and have been read into the Constitution by the Supreme Court. In 1942, Justice Frank Murphy summarized the case law: "There are certain well-defined and limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise a Constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous and the insulting or “fighting” words – those which by their very utterances inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace."[69]

Traditionally, however, if the speech did not fall within one of the above categorical exceptions, it was protected speech. In 1969, the Supreme Court protected a Ku Klux Klan member’s racist and hate-filled speech and created the ‘imminent danger’ test to permit hate speech. The court ruled in Brandenburg v. Ohio that; "The constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a state to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force, or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."[70]

This test has been modified very little from its inception in 1969 and the formulation is still good law in the United States. Only speech that poses an imminent danger of unlawful action, where the speaker has the intention to incite such action and there is the likelihood that this will be the consequence of his or her speech, may be restricted and punished by that law.

In R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, (1992), the issue of freedom to express hatred arose again when a gang of white racists burned a cross in the front yard of a black family. The local ordinance in St. Paul, Minnesota, criminalized such racist and hate-filled expressions and the teenager was charged thereunder. Antonin Scalia, writing for SCOTUS, held that the prohibition against hate speech was unconstitutional as it contravened the First Amendment. The Supreme Court struck down the ordinance. Scalia explicated the fighting words exception as follows: “The reason why fighting words are categorically excluded from the protection of the First Amendment is not that their content communicates any particular idea, but that their content embodies a particularly intolerable (and socially unnecessary) mode of expressing whatever idea the speaker wishes to convey”.[71] Because the hate speech ordinance was not concerned with the mode of expression, but with the content of expression, it was a violation of the freedom of speech. Thus, the Supreme Court embraced the idea that hate speech is permissible unless it will lead to imminent hate violence.[72]
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Last edited by footfootfoot; 04-30-2014 at 12:46 PM.
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