March 30, 2007
Guns and Speech Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:35 PM EST A long while back, we American Heritage.com contributors debated whether violations of free speech were the special preserve of the left or something that activists on both the left and right were guilty of. I scarcely remember the details of the exchange, except that a few of us agreed that campus disruptions were more likely to be instigated by left-wing activists than by right-wing activists. I see little to gain in belaboring my original point—to wit, that very few extremists on either side of the political spectrum respect the free speech rights of their opponents. Instead, I’ll just agree with Mr. Gordon that people who disrupt a campus talk should be appropriately disciplined, and move on from there. This month saw two very interesting free-speech cases come to public light. In one instance, a high school student in Alaska was suspended for hoisting a banner that read “Bong Hits for Jesus” during an Olympic torch procession. Though the student was not standing on school property (he was on a public sidewalk), administrators claimed that his message undermined the school’s legitimate interest in promoting a drug-free environment. Moreover, he was still on school time. A federal appellate court disagreed, finding that the school violated the student’s constitutional rights, and the case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Many miles away, in Wilton, Connecticut, a public school principal barred students from performing an original play about the Iraq War. Written under the direction of the school’s drama teacher, and drawing on the diaries, oral histories, and letters of current soldiers and marines, the script, entitled Voices in Conflict, attempts to convey the challenges faced by young servicemen in Iraq. From the description in The New York Times, the play sounds neither prowar nor antiwar but just thoughtful, provocative, and challenging. Nevertheless, Timothy H. Canty, the school principal, explained that the show must not go on, because it might offend local families “who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak.” Last week this blog hosted a brief discussion of the Second Amendment. We noted that many liberal legal scholars concede that while the amendment may originally have been intended to protect state militias from a tyrannical central state, the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified in 1868) changed the nature of the Second Amendment by effectively conferring on individuals the right to bear arms. Liberal scholars like Lawrence Tribe and Akhil Reed Amar are willing to concede this point, because they wish to be consistent. If the Reconstruction-era process of constitutional revision greatly expanded the individual liberties enjoyed by U.S. citizens, this expansion must apply to the entire Bill of Rights, and not just to the Second Amendment. When Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, it did so largely to countermand “black codes” enacted by Southern states. These statutes sharply restricted the rights of freed slaves to own guns and to assemble and speak freely. If the Fourteenth Amendment rendered the Second Amendment more powerful, by the same logic, it gave new muscle to the First Amendment. The question is, will conservatives who insist on a constitutional right to carry a concealed semiautomatic weapon also stand up for students in Juneau, Alaska, and Walton, Connecticut? (Ignore for a moment the terrible irony here. The good people of Walton pay their school principal to discourage students from writing original work about the most pressing social and political question of their time. Bravo for public education.) Will Second Amendment absolutists defend the rights of teenagers to say what they want on public streets and in the school auditorium? Can we expect Wayne LaPierre to file a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of these young people? Will conservatives of the libertarian persuasion be consistent?
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