What liberals need to learn about free speech

By Zach Brown, a student at Chapman university in CA.

I am a democrat. I love former President Barack Obama and I vigorously campaigned for Hillary Clinton to become our president. I support liberal candidates and progressive causes in our political environment.

I wanted to lead with that because, unfortunately, my opinion will be unfavorable to a sizeable percentage of the liberal community at Chapman.

Freedom of speech and freedom of expression have become conservative principles. I say this with anguish and disappointment, but this has become a reality on college and university campuses.

Freedom of speech is the first protection outlined in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. It protects the rights of individuals to freely and openly express their opinions, viewpoints and ideas without fear of persecution. The Founding Fathers understood the importance of free speech in a functioning and thriving democracy.

While the Supreme Court has issued limits on the First Amendment (such as yelling “fire” in a crowded theater), it has also extended this protection to include hate and offensive speech, as seen in Brandenburg v. Ohio with the Ku Klux Klan, National Socialist Party v. Skokie with neo-Nazis, and Synder v. Phelps with the Westboro Baptist Church.

As every American should, I denounce and condemn these evil, poisonous and objectionable organizations. Hatred, bigotry and racism are prevalent, and they need to be addressed without hesitation. However, every organization and individual who prescribes to these deplorable values has a constitutional right to express them without inciting violence. It is not our job to deny them this right. Rather, it is our job to fight against these repulsive viewpoints with our own exercise of peaceful free speech.

But on college campuses, students have become increasingly distracted and have illogically extended the definition of hate speech to include differing speech. We have witnessed this at Berkeley, the College of William of Mary, Cardiff University, UCLA, the University of Wisconsin Madison, and numerous other campuses across the country. Students eradicate differences of opinion and preserve an echo chamber of liberal principles that are regarded as unobjectionable truths. We have perpetuated a cycle of labeling conservatives as racist, xenophobic and prejudice without allowing the necessary dialogue to understand their perspective and encourage healthy debate. If we have the right answers, why are we afraid to hear the other side?

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Zach Brown will be voting Republican by the time he is 30