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Books Unfree speech

GORDON PARSONS is intrigued by a survey of US legal cases of defamation and the political bias they expose

You Can’t Always Say What You Want
by Dennis Baron, Cambridge University Press, £20

IN our woke-weary world, a book promising to be about “our freedom of speech and the legal ‘buts’ that complicate it” would appear to be particularly welcome.

The author, an emeritus professor of English at Illinois University, concentrates primarily on historical attempts by US lawcourts to come to terms with ever-changing social, political and moral conditions while working under the shadow of the first amendment of the US constitution’s prohibition of any law “abridging the freedom of speech.”

The US focus, and an index citing over 90 law cases, may initially deter the reader. There is, however, much here for anyone interested in the current British concerns with acceptable language — “protected” and “unprotected” speech.

Dennis Baron is aware that laws banning certain kinds of speech — in Britain principally hate speech — that can be characterised as either abusive or threatening speech, or writing that expresses prejudice on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or similar grounds, will face the difficulty of establishing a definition of terms and the intention of the speaker themselves.

What did the speaker or writer mean by his or her use of a word and what was the intention behind the use of that language? 

He recognises that “laws forbidding certain kinds of speech … enforce ideas about class, race, gender and appropriate behavior.” 

His book examines free speech issues relating to politics, obscenity, threats, official language and compelled speech. Notably — and surprisingly — he excludes blasphemy. 

In at the deep end, Baron asks whether Donald Trump’s “stop the steal” speech in January 2021 that sparked the attack on the Capitol building (and was an event described by the Republican National Committee as “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse”) can be defended, as Trump claimed, under the terms of the First Amendment.

Even that hallowed document, however, recognises exceptions for categories including obscenity, fraud, child pornography and (unfortunately for Trump) speech that incites imminent lawless action. In the US, unlike Britain, hate speech is “protected.”

In the US the language of guns speaks with a louder voice than words and the constitution’s second amendment’s protection for gun ownership, as Baron points out, leaves the speech of anyone without a weapon “unprotected.”

For all the continuing arguments, he notes that whereas in 1969 the courts reversed the indictment of a Ku Klux Klan member for urging “revengeance” against African-Americans at a rally, “the speech of communists remained steadfastly outside the first amendment’s free speech guarantee.”

But, such controversies aside, the difficulties US law had in dealing with free speech relating to politics were nothing to those coping with obscene literature and, later, cinema. 

The Hays Code established by Hollywood to offset legal objections to perceived obscenity in films may now seem comic, with struggles over the famous “I don’t give a damn” line from Gone With the Wind in 1939. But nothing much changes.

As I write, a US teacher has been fired for showing pictures of Michelangelo’s statue of David to children in lessons on the Renaissance.

Dennis Baron continues with chapters dealing with more immediate social problems such as abusive and threatening language in the social media, and concludes, asking the question, “Will free speech survive?”

Perhaps the main advice and warning Baron’s book leaves the reader with is not to make a fortress out of the dictionary.

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