Speech Is Not Violence and Violence Is Not Speech
College campuses have long been bastions of free speech where just about any idea can be discussed or debated. In the 1960s, the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley was launched to protest restrictions on free speech and political activities on college campuses.
Ironically, the opposite is happening today. Now, many administrators and college students are arguing to restrict free speech. More and more, people are labeling speech they deem offensive as “violence,” and many are using intimidation, threats, heckler’s vetoes, destruction of property, and violence to shut down the speech of those with whom they disagree. Some even justify such misconduct in the name of exercising their “speech.”
But speech is not violence, and violence is not speech. To misunderstand this is to misunderstand the nature of freedom and the importance of free speech in civilized society.
What speech does the First Amendment protect?
The First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” This provision offers broad protections for various kinds of speech, including talking, writing, art, messages on clothing, political donations, symbolic speech (like marches or burning a flag), and many others.
The First Amendment also broadly protects Americans from both censorship (being prevented from speaking) and compelled speech (being forced to speak something you don’t believe).
Alliance Defending Freedom has represented parties in several key U.S. Supreme Court cases protecting the freedom of speech, including Reed v. Town of Gilbert (2015), NIFLA v. Becerra (2018), and 303 Creative v. Elenis (2023).
What speech does the First Amendment not protect?
Despite broad protections for the freedom of speech, there are some important exceptions—speech that the First Amendment does not protect, such as:
- Incitement – Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969)
- Obscenity – Miller v. California (1973)
- Defamation and libel – New York Times Company v. Sullivan (1964)
- Fraud – Illinois ex rel. Madigan v. Telemarketing Associates, Inc. (2003)
- Fighting words – Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942)
- True threats – Virginia v. Black (2003), Counterman v. Colorado (2023)
- Speech integral to criminal conduct – Giboney v. Empire Storage & Ice Company (1949)
Notice what is not on this list: speech a person deems “offensive” or even “hateful.”
In Texas v. Johnson (1989), the Supreme Court said that “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendmhttps://goodshepherdmedia.net/speech-is-not-violence-and-violence-is-not-speech#hatespeechent, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” For this reason, Supreme Court rulings have protected even the vile speech of Nazis (National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie (1977)) and the Westboro Baptist Church, known for protesting the funerals of fallen soldiers (Snyder v. Phelps (2011)).
The reason the Court has protected such reprehensible speech is not that such speech is necessarily good. On the contrary, messages like those described above can be hurtful or downright evil. Yet that speech is protected because, as former ACLU president Nadine Strossen writes in her book HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, “If we allowed government to suppress speech that might exert a negative influence on our minds or actions, then no speech would be safe.”
In other words, if the government were given the power to regulate hurtful speech, then anyone’s views could be targeted for censorship—conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, religious or atheist. Those in power could censor any disfavored view they please—simply by labeling it offensive, uncivil, hateful, or harmful.
Speech can hurt, but it is not violence
Words have power. Few would dispute that words, and the ideas they represent, have the potential to accomplish great things for good or ill. As University of Chicago professor Richard M. Weaver once wrote, ideas have consequences.
Because words have power, some assert that certain words should be considered “violence.”
For example, Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist and psychologist writing at The New York Times, argues that the long-term negative physical effects of words that induce stress could be considered violence. “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence.”
On this basis, Barrett argues that provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos should not be allowed to speak at public campuses because he is “part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse.”
Jonathan Haidt, professor of social psychology at New York University, and Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) point out a flaw in Barrett’s reasoning. In an Atlantic article, they write that if we follow Barrett’s logic, “The resulting inference should be merely that words can cause physical harm, not that words are violence. If you’re not convinced, just re-run the syllogism starting with ‘gossiping about a rival,’ for example, or ‘giving one’s students a lot of homework.’ Both practices can cause prolonged stress to others, but that doesn’t turn them into forms of violence.”
They also note that Barrett’s example of having Yiannopoulos once on campus does not fulfill her own criteria of long-term stress, since, presumably, it would be a one-time event.
All of this to say: words can certainly hurt our feelings in the short term, and prolonged verbal abuse can lead to adverse physical and emotional effects in the long term. We don’t want to ignore the harm that caustic and abusive words can cause. But acknowledging that speech can hurt is different than labeling speech as violence. Here’s why:
1. Speech and violence are substantively different
Nadine Strossen notes that physical violence (like punching someone) has a 1-to-1 correspondence between the action and the harm done. The potential harm in words, however, largely depends on the person hearing the words and his or her perception of their meaning.
As Dr. Pamela Paresky writes in Psychology Today, “Two people can interact with the same circumstances and perceive the stress of that experience differently. If one person tells herself that listening to a speaker is going to be intolerable and harmful, it stands to reason that the experience will be more stressful for her than it will be for the person who tells herself it will be illuminating, or an opportunity to defeat a bad idea. (Or a chance to take a nap…).”
These kinds of situations can become self-fulfilling prophecies. If college students are being told that offensive ideas will harm them if they merely listen to those words or engage in civil dialogue with someone who holds opposing views, then it is far more likely they will feel psychically or emotionally harmed by the interaction than if they see it as an opportunity to learn.
All this to say, words don’t pose an intrinsic harm in the same way that physical violence does. Physical violence has direct, immediate, and destructive consequences. The potential harm from words, however, largely rests on the interpretation of the person hearing them.
2. Offensiveness is hopelessly subjective
What someone perceives as offensive will vary greatly from person to person. If the government were to attempt to regulate speech based on offensiveness, it would not only have to sort out petty squabbles, treating free people like naughty children; it would also make minority viewpoints subject to the whims and perceptions of those in power and what they deem “offensive.”
3. Most speech that directly harms others is already illegal
As noted above, types of speech that have a more direct correlation to harm (like incitement, fighting words, fraud, and defamation) are already illegal and subject to government regulation.
4. Classifying speech as “violence” leads to more actual violence.
If we call speech “violence” in the same way as we would physical violence, people feel more justified in using physical violence to stifle speech. If we outlaw our nonviolent tools of resolving conflict (i.e., expressing and then debating different perspectives on current issues), we are left only with violent tools. Some have already argued for using violence, and many are taking action. Some ADF clients and employees have experienced similar situations.
- In 2017, a Fresno State University professor wiped away a Students for Life chalk display—and instructed his students to do the same—in the name of exercising his “speech.” After filing a lawsuit against the professor, ADF secured a settlement and the professor had to undergo First Amendment training by ADF attorneys.
- In 2022, ADF’s then-General Counsel Kristen Waggoner was harassed, intimidated, and shouted down by protesters during an event at Yale Law School. Police had to be called so that Kristen and Monica Miller of the American Humanist Association (with whom Kristen was supposed to dialogue) could be escorted to safety. (Yale later reinvited Kristen to a different event in January 2023, and thankfully, she was able to speak without being shouted down.)
- In March 2023, Students for Life of America held an event at Virginia Commonwealth University. The invited speakers were shouted down with obscenities, called Nazis, and physically attacked by students while police and the university did little to stop the violence. After ADF filed a demand letter, the university allowed a “do-over” event where proper security ensured the event could take place.
Viewing free speech as, well, “speech” allows for a conversation and dialogue to take place. As Lukianoff writes, “Ironically, the whole point of freedom of speech, from its beginning, has been to enable people to sort things out without resorting to violence.”
The potential harms that might come from speech do not justify the actual harm that will come with violence. source
Is hate speech protected by the First Amendment?
A recent survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education found that a majority of Americans (57%) correctly recognize that the First Amendment protects hate speech from governmental regulation, punishment, or censorship — but 45% think that it should not be protected.
Why is hate speech protected?
The First Amendment makes no general exception for offensive, repugnant, or hateful expression.
In Snyder v. Phelps, the United States Supreme Court protected in an 8-1 decision the hateful speech of the Westboro Baptist Church — known for picketing military funerals with signs that read “God hates fags” and “Thank God for dead soldiers” — during a 2006 protest near the funeral of Lance Corporal Matthew A. Snyder, a Marine killed in Iraq. Federal courts even protected the free speech rights of Nazis, who in 1977 were denied a permit to march through Skokie, Illinois, a village where many former Holocaust survivors lived. (Although the Nazis prevailed in court, the march actually never took place.)
The First Amendment makes no general exception for offensive, repugnant, or hateful expression.
As FIRE has explained many times before, speech by adults as free citizens does not lose First Amendment protection because it is considered hateful. This is because hate speech in and of itself is protected speech, particularly when spoken by adults on their own time.
When does hate speech lose First Amendment protections?
Not all hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, since hateful expression can fall within certain, narrow categories of unprotected speech such as:
- Incitement to imminent lawless action (incitement);
- speech that threatens serious bodily harm (true threats); or
- speech that causes an immediate breach of the peace (fighting words).
If the hateful speech falls within one of these unprotected categories, then it is not protected by the First Amendment. If it falls outside these categories, then the speech will remain protected by the First Amendment in most contexts, with a handful of other narrow exceptions for public employees and institutions. For example, a public employer can discipline a public employee, like a police officer or firefighter, who hurls a racist invective at a citizen while on duty. Likewise, a public grade school official can punish a student for maliciously yelling a racial slur at another student in the hallway. Officials at K-12 institutions may reasonably believe that such speech would cause a material and substantial disruption of school activities and interfere with the rights of others.
The trouble with regulating hate speech
The First Amendment provides the greatest degree of protection to political speech, disallows discrimination against speech based on viewpoint, and generally prohibits the passage of vague or broad laws that impact speech. Laws must not sweep too broadly and must define key terms so that speakers know when their speech crosses the line into illegality.
A key problem with regulating hate speech, as free-speech scholars such as Nadine Strossen have identified, is that it remains difficult, if not impossible, to define exactly what constitutes hate speech. There remains an eye-of-the-beholder phenomenon with hate speech. Strossen writes in her book, “Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship,” that “the term ‘hate speech’ is not a legal term of art, with a specific definition; rather it is deployed to stigmatize and to suppress widely varying expression.”
As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed so eloquently in his 1929 dissent in United States v. Schwimmer, “[I]f there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
Nearly 90 years later, in 2017, Justice Samuel Alito memorably expressed this concept in Matal v. Tam with a homage to Justice Holmes, writing:
Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.”
A free society must give much breathing space to hateful speech in order to avoid thought control and the censorship of unpopular views by the government. Instead of stifling free speech, we, as free citizens, have the power to most effectively answer hateful speech through protest, mockery, debate, questioning, silence, or by simply walking away. source
Is speech dangerous? Do some words qualify as “violent”? I was raised on the idea that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me.” On the other hand, we are also taught that Jesus was “the Word,” and that words have power to change lives, for good or evil. Growing up, I liked the idea of “killing words” in the book Dune, that saying a specific word with a specific intention could become a weapon to protect you from those who wish you harm. It seemed a very literal version of “the pen is mightier than the sword.”
“When we dehumanise and demonise our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them.” Nelson Mandela
A modern trend is that we have trigger and content warnings when someone shares information or stories that may cause anxiety or trauma to those who have survived scarring experiences. We also try to use more sensitive language to be “politically correct” rather than being offensive toward groups of people who have often been marginalized in the past. I support the idea of political correctness and improving society’s treatment of those who have been marginalized.
“But it is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I touch by what I have said. You are hurting yourself. There is no way I can take this personally.”
― Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
Last week I explored a chapter I found somewhat troubling in The Coddling of the American Mind. This week, I’ll tackle another chapter that has some potentially problematic ideas in it, the idea that the modern trend of politically correct speech and considering some speech dangerous is making the younger generation weaker (less resilient) and more willing to resort to violence when threatened. It is also contributing to less civil discourse, even while drawing attention to the ways in which unintentional incivility occurs.
The authors cite case after case of real world examples from universities in which a professor did or said something a student found objectionable (or used a textbook that contained something a student deemed offensive), and even if that professor did so while explaining to the students that the material was not his or her own perspective, a student complaint to administration led to that professor ultimately losing a job, tenure, or reputation. There were examples of speakers being invited to campus that resulted in violent demonstrations as well. Some of the conclusions from the authors:
- When we consider speech to be “dangerous,” it makes us weaker and more vulnerable when in reality, we are stronger than ideas and speech.
- Calling speech violence makes it psychologically more acceptable to commit physical violence to combat ideas.
- This creates a “call out” culture where reputations are destroyed over a deliberately simplistic understanding of the actions or words of others by vindictive students who are supported and praised for their bravery while really just employing mob mentality.
While the cases shared are somewhat alarming in how over-sensitive they seem, almost like a PC witch hunt at some liberal arts colleges, coming from within Mormondom (and even within the red state of AZ), they feel . . . foreign to my experience. I wish I encountered more people on a regular basis who give a damn about the experiences of marginalized people, but honestly, I find a lot of people who are surprisingly callous.
Generally, I agree with the idea that speech isn’t violence and calling it violence is hyperbole. The book also gives the dictum, prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child. In other words, a resilient adult is able to navigate difficult situations that will eventually arise better than one for whom the road has always been made easy.
In a discussion in another forum someone was bemoaning the authoritative and shaming approach to bishop’s interviews (not specifically abuse), and many were agreeing that they should be done away with. I joked that kids need to learn to lie to bishops on their own terms. I was kidding in substance, but in another manner, I was not. If someone asserts authority over you, and lots of people will throughout your life, you are the one who gives them that authority. They can stamp their foot and say “serve me,” but only your agreement that they hold power over you makes them powerful.
The book points out the flaw with something called Emotional Reasoning. When we take our emotions as “facts” rather than “information,” we are prone to going quickly down a rabbit hole of fear and feeling unsafe. The qualities of this thinking include:
- Catastrophizing. Imagining the worst case possibility as likely or certain to occur.
- Labeling. Using terms like “rape culture” and “microaggression” for accidental or unintentional slights, even if these terms help to bring a societal issue to the forefront.
- Overgeneralizing. Assuming that the idea behind the emotion we are feeling is widespread and powerful.
- Dichotomous thinking. Seeing people as either good or bad, not misinformed or scared or flawed, but actually seeking our demise.
“You can have many great ideas in your head, but what makes the difference is the action. Without action upon an idea, there will be no manifestation, no results, and no reward”
― Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom
The book points out that trigger warnings may be counter-productive to victims of PTSD:
“Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD. Severe emotional reactions triggered by course material are a signal that students need to prioritize their mental health and obtain evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral therapies that will help them overcome PTSD. These therapies involve gradual, systematic exposure to traumatic memories until their capacity to trigger distress diminishes.”
The book talks about the dangers of our current “call out” culture in which individuals are publicly shamed for acts they didn’t intend to be offensive. The New Testament cautions us not to make someone an offender for a word. However, a lot of this calling out is long overdue, in my opinion, and I certainly think that it’s as important to stop being offensive as it is to be thick-skinned and slow to take offense. As we’ve seen in the #metoo movement, there are too many things that it’s been the norm to let go unaddressed, without checking that behavior.
The book asserts: “Many students on the left have become increasingly receptive to the idea that violence is sometimes justified as a response to speech they believe is “hateful.” At the same time, many students on the right have become increasingly eager to invite speakers that are likely to provoke a reaction from the left.”
In this reactive culture, both sides are baiting each other which may feel like winning but is ultimately unproductive. The reality is that neither side is engaging with the other. It’s not solely that we are dealing with two different sets of facts; it’s that we can watch the same set of facts in such different ways that it’s as though we aren’t watching the same thing.[1]
What makes speech dangerous is power to enact or normalize ideas that harm people. For example, was the anti-Semitic speech in pre-Nazi Germany dangerous? Yes! It led to a normalization of radical ideas that resulted in genocide. Is homophobic speech dangerous in the same way? I certainly think it could be. But if we’ve learned anything in Trump’s America, it’s that avoiding these ideas and labeling those people who hold them as “bad” hasn’t stopped them. They just went underground until they could surface again, turning up like the proverbial bad penny.
The book proceeds to call this avoidance of “dangerous” or “trigger-inducing” speech Safetyism. Safetyism is the idea that we have to protect young people, both physically and emotionally, from upsetting ideas (or people who disagree) as well as real world dangers. When people seek “safe spaces” and request “trigger warnings,” the authors assert that we are dealing with “Safetyism,” and that leads to censorship of ideas, and a weakened ability to deal with opposition in a social environment in mature ways.
The book makes the analogy to peanut allergies which were relatively unheard of in my youth, but are now so prevalent–and life-threatening–that many campuses prohibit peanut butter and peanut products from their lunch rooms. What happened in the last few decades? By protecting children from peanut allergies, rather than making them more immune to peanuts, peanuts became deadly. Peanut allergies are now a very real, very common threat, whereas they didn’t used to be nearly so common nor so deadly. It is precisely because we fought them through avoidance that they became a bigger threat. Kids did not build up the antibodies needed to combat milder peanut allergies through routine low-grade exposure.
The book talks about the idea of “emotional safety,” a relatively new concept on college campuses. If a person doesn’t “feel” safe, as he or she (or zhe) defines it, the teacher may be accused of not caring about student safety, and students may become upset.
When my son attended BYU-I during the 2016 election, this idea of safe spaces was at a high point. He, like many others his age (though not many at BYU) wore a safety pin to symbolize alliance with groups targeted by Trump in what many considered hate speech: LGBT, racial minorities, women. He found himself surrounded by those who shared Trump’s views, whose comments he found upsetting. He didn’t want to go back.
While I agree that some environments are toxic, I also pointed out that he could have spoken up. Just wearing a safety pin isn’t the same as telling someone, “Hey, I don’t agree with what you are saying. I’m friends with gay people, and you’re wrong about them.” Assuming that everyone else agreed with these terrible comments doesn’t mean they did. Even the boys who said these homophobic things might have been using them as a cover for their own sexual orientation. Or like my son, the boys who didn’t say anything could have been silently upset and afraid to confront others. He can avoid the problem by avoiding BYU-I, or he can become more comfortable speaking up.
Sam Harris’ book on Lying talks about the danger of lying when confronted with danger. He uses an example of a murderer coming to your door, and lying to protect the person he’s seeking. He pointed out that even if you lie to protect others in the home from a murderer, you only kick the problem down the road. The killer will go to the next house to murder someone. Likewise, when we avoid dealing with ideas we dislike, they don’t go away. They go underground and spread.
There’s a tactic used in lucid dreaming when you are plagued by a danger in a nightmare. If you flee, the danger grows. If you turn to face it, it shrinks and eventually disappears. That’s an idea I can get behind.
- How do we balance protecting kids from real dangers like predators and sexual abusers and giving them the tools to be resilient when they are faced with danger?
- How do we point out previously overlooked offensive behaviors without falling into the traps of emotional reasoning (catastrophising, etc.), particularly when there are still plenty of people who don’t want to acknowledge the concerns of the marginalized?
- Do you see a parallel between this “safetyism” trend and ideas like “obey your leaders” and “not even once”? Are we creating lack of spiritual resilience in this avoidance of risk and thinking?
- What has happened when you’ve either avoided or confronted an objectionable idea?
- Can speech be violence or is that hyperbole?
Discuss.
[1] For a recent example, the Kavanaugh hearing was to me very obviously showing a person who was unfit for the office. Whether or not he sexually assaulted Dr. Ford (I believe he did attempt to do so), he was so partisan and lacking in composure that he did not meet my standards for a judiciary. But to the conservatives watching it, they saw a favored son mistreated, seeing it as unfair to judge anyone based on their adolescent behavior, and seeing it as normal for someone to react the way he did in the face of unfair treatment. source