First Amendment Relativists

Simple Justice quotes CEI`s Hans Bader on the NPR Ombudsman`s opinion on free speech and the Charlie Hebdo attack:

In his parting shot as ombudsman for National Public Radio, Edward Schumacher-Matos raised quite a few eyebrows. … he throws up Charlie Hebdo, as the secondary trope of speech gone bad. …

"I do not know if American courts would find much of what Charlie Hebdo does to be hate speech unprotected by the Constitution, but I know—hope?—that most Americans would. It is one thing to lampoon popes, imams, rabbis and other temporal religious leaders of this world; it is quite another to make fun, in often nasty ways, of their prophets and gods."

As Eugene Volokh and Hans Bader explain without breaking a sweat, Schumacher-Matos is plainly wrong about the law.  The First Amendment protects blasphemy and what Schumacher-Matos calls “hate speech,” itself a phrase calculated to make it sound horrible when its meaning is “speech you personally hate.”  And all of this is wrapped up in an ugly package called First Amendment fundamentalism.