Page 18 - Delaware Lawyer - Fall 2019

FEATURE
Nadine Strossen
This essay is adapted from the
keynote address delivered by the author Nadine Strossen at the 2019 Harvard Law Review Annual Spring Banquet.
Resisting Hate
Why the ACLU supports free speech — even when that speech is repugnant
As the media have extensively covered, since the Charlottesville catastrophe in 2017, the ACLU has faced increased pressure to abandon its always- controversial support of free speech when that speech is used to express views that are repugnant to our own human rights principles.
16 DELAWARE LAWYER FALL 2019
Next year will mark our 100th birthday, and our free-speech position dates back to our beginnings. To be sure,
we must always be willing to re-examine even longstanding principles and strate- gies. Indeed, as an organization dedicated to open inquiry, debate and dissent, we should always welcome such re-examina- tion. Likewise, throughout my career, I have personally wrestled with these im- portant questions about defending free- dom even for “the thought that we hate,” to quote Justices Holmes’ famous phrase.
Even beyond my lifelong commitment to civil rights, these questions arise from my personal family history, as the daugh- ter of a German Jew who barely survived his enslavement at the Buchenwald con- centration camp.
Most recently, I have been grappling with these issues while working on my 2018 book, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, and in my ongoing nonstop talks and interviews about it. As the book’s title underscores,
my main focus and goal is resisting hate, and stereotyping and discrimination.
Through the research I did for the book, and my constant ongoing research since then, I have seen mounting evi- dence that restricting “hate speech” does more harm than good specifically to the goals that such restrictions are hoped to promote. These are goals to which I am completely committed: equality, dignity, diversity, inclusivity, societal harmony and individual well-being.
I have reached this conclusion by ex- amining the actual track record of hate speech laws in other countries, includ- ing many developed democracies that are comparable to our own. More important- ly, I have learned that this same conclu- sion has been reached by many human rights activists in many other countries, as well as by regional and international human rights organizations and agencies, ranging from Human R ights Watch, to the European Commission Against Rac- ism and Intolerance, to UNESCO.
with Free Speech