Sources & Extracts

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The authors of Words That Wound offer the following view of the First Amendment and the importance of the hate speech debate:
Now the defenders of the status quo have discovered, in the first amendment, a new weapon. The debate about affirmative action and the inclusion of historically excluded groups is being recast a debate about free speech….
The first amendment arms conscious and unconscious racists --Nazis and liberals alike-- with a constitutional right to be racist. Racism is just another idea deserving of constitutional protection like all ideas. The first amendment is employed to trump or nullify the only substantive meaning of the equal protection clause, that the Constitution mandates the disestablishment of the ideology of racism.
What is ultimately at stake in this debate is our vision for this society. We are in this fight about the first amendment because it is more than a fight about how to balance one individual's freedom of speech against another individual's freedom from injury. This is a fight about the substantive content that we will give to the ideals of freedom and equality -- how we will construct "freedom," as a constitutional premise and a defining principle of democracy.
Reference: See Words That Wound, p. 14-15.