Derek Bok's Prohibiting Hate Speech?

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This Title is Censored Should the First Amendment stop protecting hate speech? In Derek Bok’s “Protecting Freedom of Expression on the Campus”, he argues that hate speech should be protected as censorship would be against the First Amendment. He declares “One reason why the power of censorship is so dangerous is that it is extremely difficult to decide when a particular communications is offensive enough to warrant prohibition or to weigh the degree is offensiveness against the potential value of communication.... if we were to forbid flags, it is only a short step to prohibiting offensive speakers” (Bok 67) What Bok is attempting to say is that we can technically declare anything as offensive. The idea of hate speech is varying on the opinion of a person rather than law. …show more content…

This same person may be a powerful political figure with a bias against men and be using derogatory and aggressive behavior but we do not call them out on this hate speech in fear that they may call their opponents NAZIs and fascists for not supporting their cause but in modern day society this is not “hate speech” but rather freedom of speech. Hate speech is not a constant in society and the culture itself may be prejudiced but the society does not see this as such and believes it to be ‘equality”. Well with freedom of speech, controversy can be combated when both sides have the ability to speak and come to a solution and discover if something is hate speech in the modern political world. If the first amendment was to block hate speech, it would be nearly impossible for there to be an argument that can be resolved as just calling a person a hate speech promoter is a slander and would be used to discredit a person without proper

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