The right to celebrate

(7/2025) We might be losing rights a little at a time, but we still exercise our right to celebrate America’s birthday. Who doesn’t like a party? The Fourth of July is a celebration of what we have as Americans. Freedom and property. Property rights are easy to define. Civil rights and freedom? Easy to give to ourselves, not so easy to give to others.

The founding of the United States of America was based on the idea that to protect an individual’s property, our governing laws have to protect everyone’s property. Freedom of Speech supports the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

One reason Freedom of Speech is explicitly included in the Bill of Rights is that historically one punishment for speaking out was to seize property. Most of the Founding Fathers were only a generation or two away from living in England where their fathers and mothers would have seen up close the King taking property from someone who displeased him.

The current administration expects people to not use specific words—equity, women, climate change. Funding is withheld from educational institutions simply because they offended the President.

The NIH is losing funding, in turn rescinding funding for projects that impact all of us. One defunded project in Mississippi is a study to find a "novel treatment for glioblastoma", a form of brain cancer that can occur in any anyone, not a specific demographic. It is defunded because one of the scientists, Eden Tanner, has a disability. The study had qualified for funding from a pool of money designated for researchers with disabilities. The Trump Administration virtually uses a keyword search to identify what to remove based on how it fits into the DEI category. Not based on merit or efficacy, just using the wrong word when applying for funding—disability.

The right to say anything has long been defended, not defunded. The ACLU defended a Chicago based group of Nazis in Skokie, Illinois in 1977. The group wanted to prove their right to free speech by having a demonstration of their obsession of hating another group of people. Their pushy little display was to be held in Skokie, a town where about 50% of the population was Jewish, many of them Holocaust survivors. The group asked the ACLU to represent them in defending the First Amendment right of an American to speak in support of anything.

The demonstration was a protest against "decisions by Chicago-area park districts, including Skokie’s, barring them from holding a demonstration in Chicago area parks." It was to be about 30 minutes, consisting of the participants wearing Nazi uniforms with swastika armbands and carrying Nazi banners and signs.

"Everything that the village did in opposition to the assembly boiled down to the same thing: Skokie wanted what is known to lawyers as a "prior restraint" against any Nazi speech in Skokie. In non-technical language, this meant that Skokie wanted to find a way to stop the Nazis from speaking before they had a chance to articulate their message.

The First Amendment principles that apply to prior restraints are straightforward. While any effort to censor by punishing a speaker after the fact is likely to violate the First Amendment, preventing the speech ahead of time is even more likely to violate the Constitution, even where the anticipated speech is profoundly offensive and hateful. Central to the ACLU’s mission is the understanding that if the government can prevent lawful speech because it is offensive and hateful, then it can prevent any speech that it dislikes. In other words, the power to censor Nazis includes the power to censor protesters of all stripes and to prevent the press from publishing embarrassing facts and criticism that government officials label as "fake news." Ironically, Skokie’s efforts to enjoin the Nazi demonstration replicated the efforts of Southern segregationist communities to enjoin civil rights marches led by Martin Luther King during the 1960s."—from the ACLU website

The ACLU invited, and received, major criticism by taking this case. That’s what Americans do, take on a project no one wants, and take the heat for it. It’s how we survived the Revolutionary, Civil, and two World Wars. We will survive the manipulation of words. Words need to mean something. We expect words to matter.

Freedom of speech is being used to say "I can say whatever I want regardless of any factor, including truth." The bar was, "you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater." When you repeat a lie to manipulate people, it is functionally setting people up for the same kind of irrational behavior as stampeding out of a crowded theater, crushing anybody in your way. Freedom of speech gives any speaker the freedom to agitate anyone in earshot to the point of loosing all impulse control. Anyone who works with, or is raising a person with a developmental disability can tell you that lack of impulse control is often the root of socially difficult behavior that disrupts peer relationships and learning in the classroom. Random, emphatically repeated comments by our elected officials and endless online "influencers" is conditioning listeners to behave as though they have a developmental disability—no impulse control.

We want freedom of speech for ourselves. If what we say comes from hurt feelings or being angry at another person or a group, so be it. We have the right to say whatever we want. We know what we expect of ourselves. But what do we expect from others? Good manners? A little patience with our opinions, while we have none for the opinions of others?

We can celebrate how much we’ve been able to work together in the last 250 years. Our constitution encourages us to work together. We can celebrate the right to turn out backs on each other.

We celebrate our right to vote for officials who would impulsively take away our rights. Or we can elect people who will bring them back.