Free Speech And Why It Matters

by Andrew Doyle

A detailed account of the case was written by Aryeh Neier, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who served as National Director of the ACLU from 1970–78. In his book, Defending My Enemy (1979), he explains that he ‘supported free speech for Nazis when they wanted to march in Skokie in order to defeat Nazis’. For Neier, the conservation of his adversary’s First Amendment rights was ‘the only way to protect a free society against the enemies of freedom’. The recent conception of ‘hate speech’ is, in effect, a kind of fudge that attempts to circumvent this moral quandary. We might label speech we despise to be ‘hateful’ and therefore not subject to constitutional protection, but we have merely redefined the terms in order to evade an uncomfortable moral obligation to defend its existence.

Aryeh Neier