It’s hard to believe that someone who is supposed to be a news analyst wouldn’t take the time to understand America’s First Amendment before writing an op-ed for The Washington Post displaying a complete lack of understanding of why we should always fight for free speech even if we don’t agree with it. EVEN IF WE DONT AGREE WITH IT!
Richard Stengel is a Muslim former Obama administration official who “endorsed the creation of a hate speech law” while working in the State Department. He’s another Obama official who has followed a career path similar to so many other Obama officials. He’s a political analyst on MSNBC, but he still hasn’t grasped the idea of free speech in a free society. Go figure.
Stengel’s WaPo op-ed argued that America needs to outlaw hateful speech…including Koran burning. Yes, he wants to go down that slippery slope, which proves he doesn’t get what free speech is and why we should fight for it.
“Yes, the First Amendment protects the ‘thought that we hate,’ but it should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw,” Stengel argued in a Washington Post op-ed Tuesday.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Stengel, who worked as the managing editor of Time magazine before becoming undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department under President Barack Obama, endorsed the creation of a hate speech law. The MSNBC analyst said his experience in the Obama administration led him to renounce the idea that the Constitution protects “not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate,” quoting Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
“As a government official traveling around the world championing the virtues of free speech, I came to see how our First Amendment standard is an outlier.”
“Even the most sophisticated Arab diplomats that I dealt with did not understand why the First Amendment allows someone to burn a Koran. Why they asked me, would you ever want to protect that?”
