Frank Misunderstands the Entire Point of the First Amendment

I am again writing on behalf of the Civil Liberties Union of Harvard (CLUH) to express our dissatisfaction with a Crimson editorial addressing a civil liberties concern, specifically Stephen E. Frank's recent column ("Speech With Costs," opinion, May 5, 1994).

Frank argues that "Americans should not be afraid to establish that some speech--because of its advocacy of hatred, intolerance, or violence against a group of people--is illegitimate and undeserving of legal protection."

Frank has misunderstood the entire point of the First Amendment. Speech is not protected under the United States Constitution based on whether or not it is determined to have value. Speech is protected simply because it is speech.

The First Amendment exists to protect speech that is controversial; ideas and assertions that are commonly accepted do not require its protection. "Hate speech"--whatever the term means--may have undesirable consequences. But to punish speech because of its content or because it is successful is to violate the very principles on which our nation was founded.

Further, censorship is inevitably a slippery slope; it is entirely dependent on an individual or group's determination of what has value, a judgment that may not reflect the speakers, much less that of society. But in Frank's United States, the government will apparently have free rein to determine what is "legitimate."

In an article last fall in The New Republic, Henry Louis Gates Jr. indicated how such censorship in fact can have unexpected consequences; for example, during the time that a hate speech code was in force at the University of Michigan every student charged under the code was Black; regulation did not create a "safe harbor."

To justify his pro-censorship argument, Frank cites the "successful" use of speech codes in other "liberal democracies" such as Germany and Canada. This assertion would be almost laughable if there wasn't a risk that it would be believed.

The censorship of neo-Nazis in Germany, for example, has only driven them underground and perhaps made them far more dangerous then before, because they cannot be debunked in an open forum.

Canada recently barred the release of any information about the murder trial of Karla Homolka, an act that resulted in the widespread censorship of newspapers and other media, and even warrantless searches of computer accounts for information that individuals could obtain about the trial from sources in the United States and elsewhere.

Canada's "success" was the trampling of the rights of its citizens and yet making the trial perhaps the best known one in Canada's history.

In fact, in recent years censorship in Canada has perhaps made the term "liberal democracy" inapplicable to the country. Canada recently adopted a law advocated by Andrea Dworkin allowing, in essence, the censorship of works with derogatory depictions of women. Similar attempts to enact such laws in the United States have been repeatedly found unconstitutional.

What was one of the first victims of Canada's new moral censors" A work by Andrea Dworkin.

Another recent law enacted in Canada prohibits not child pornography but any written or graphic depiction of individuals under 18 in sexual situations; this law could conceivably ban literary classics such as Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita or all of the works by Judy Blume. On Dec. 16, 1993, a display of works by the artist Eli Langer at the Mercer Union, a respected gallery, were seized by the Toronto Police Morality Squad. Langer now faces ten years in jail and fines--and under the law he is guilty until proven innocent.

Frank believes that the difficult but correct decision for American society to make is to censor the speech the majority of citizens do not like. He is patently incorrect.

The difficult but correct decision for American society is to permit free speech, even speech that the majority does not like and may have negative consequences.

We must realize that none of us are fit be an infallible moral censor, and we must be willing to take responsibility for our society by debating ideas in an open forum and through education, not by censorship. Jol Silversmith '94 Former Director for the Executive Board of CLUH