Twenty-nine years later, free speech back under fire

SKOKIE, Ill. - This was the last great battleground.

Twenty-nine years ago, the modern parameters of free speech were decided by the Supreme Court of the United States, and this tiny Chicago suburb was the center of the controversy. Predominately Jewish and, at the time, home to a number of Holocaust survivors, it was this quiet town where the National Socialist Party sought to stage a protest.

The prospect was horrifying – an absolute affront to the sensibilities of Americans. Klansman would be turning their hate-mongering on high and doing so in the faces of those who had experienced an all-too-real brand of anti-Semitism firsthand courtesy of Adolf Hitler.

Would the First Amendment protect this sordid brand of bigotry, or might the fighting words doctrine protect the people of Skokie from an experience that promised to be traumatizing to the nth degree? The American Civil Liberties Union went to bat for the Nazi plaintiffs, a decision so controversial even by ACLU standards that the organization's membership plummeted.

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled for the National Socialist Party. And almost 30 years later, the great cause of free speech in America is all the more robust for it.

But today those rights run the risk of atrophying. Though the United States government has long since learned to not interfere with religious speech, private enterprises are now cowering at the pressure of activists, refusing to print one of the most newsworthy images of the year because some perceive it as offensive.

Of course, those same angry and vocal activists aren't up in arms over the anti-Semitic cartoons printed by state-run media in the Arab world, or even the anti-Christian images shown in so many American newspapers on a regular basis. There may be a few letters to the editor here and there, such pictures never raise the variety of storm we have come to see here. Thus the question that must be asked is why the American media is treating one ethnic group differently.

When it was the Jews, and this Illinois village was the battleground, there certainly wasn't any special treatment. And I don't see why there should be today.