Free Speech, Always

My father, who took a somewhat jaundiced and cynical view of the United States, always retained a reverence for the Founding Fathers. He saw them as brilliant, flawed men who attempted a framework for a new nation that was, at once, remarkably innovative and forever retrograde. As a child, I was told that the best way to memorize the freedoms of the First Amendment was the acronym RASP: religion, assembly, speech, and the press. These slaveholders were still straining to uphold their Enlightenment values, and this amendment was their greatest flourish. In an era of monarchies and state religions, the Founders hoped to establish enduring freedoms that would, over the course of centuries, be a bulwark against tyranny. While the First Amendment has been, throughout the course of American history, repeatedly challenged and brutally violated—the Alien and Sedition Acts, Jim Crow, the Red Scares after World Wars I and II, the months and years following 9/11—it has, on the whole, preserved the fabric of the American republic. We are still a nation where one, as a citizen, can speak and write freely. I have never, for a single moment, been afraid when writing and reporting, and that is because of the First Amendment. That is the privilege of this country. I don’t take it lightly.