By Patrick F. Cannon

It’s not easy to be an absolutist for the First Amendment when so much hateful and goofy stuff is thrown at you from dawn to dusk – or later than dusk if you stay up late.

            Many years ago, for example, the Supreme Court decided that the American Bar Association’s ban on lawyer’s advertising their services was an unconstitutional infringement on their freedom of speech. This opened the flood gates for personal injury lawyers in particular. If you watch local commercial television, you’re bombarded by folks yelling “In a wreck, need a check?”  or “We’re the law brothers!” illustrated with the siblings yelling it from the tops of big trucks, “I’m the Illinois Hammer!” promises to bring said hammer down on the heads of evil insurance companies.

There’s even a commercial with a crazed looking lawyer showing up at an accident scene  with what appears to be a rabid pit bull. Even relatively staid personal injury firms are forced to run defensive ads to at least stay in the public eye. Almost all of them tell you  they will charge no fee unless they win. What they don’t tell you is that they won’t take a case they won’t win, and that they will get at least a third of any payout.

Another ban that has been lifted is one that forbade prescription drug advertising. I’m sure you’ve noticed the deluge of ads for weight loss drugs. But there are others that seem directed at exceedingly small numbers of potential patients. The great actor Morgan Freeman appears in one for a heart medication that most people have never heard of and that must have relatively few sufferers. Yet the drug company spends a great deal of money so it must feel it gets it back in new business.

Strangely, there was never a ban on over-the-counter drug advertising, even for questionable patent medicines. Whoever my age can forget Serutan (nature spelled backwards), a cure all tonic for the gullible. The airwaves are still full of ads for dubious nostrums, including some that are supposed to restore your brain power. Buying them simply proves the opposite.

In many ways, political speech is the most troublesome. When the Supreme Court decided that freedom of speech extended to corporations, unions, and other organizations, it opened the floodgates to massive infusion of cash to political campaigns, including so-called “dark money.” During election cycles, we are now bombarded with negative commercials about even the most blameless candidates. And it’s relentless. Frankly, most voters just tune them out, but the television stations are forced to  run them. Well, a bucks a buck.

All our recent presidents, including Obama and Biden, have sought to limit what they consider to be “hate speech,” which is often just vigorous criticism of their policies. They pressured popular online sites to better “police” objectionable content, for example, with implied threat to take some action against them. The current occupant of the “bigger, better” White House has taken this sensitivity to a whole new level. We now have a president who blackmails (successfully, alas) networks and gleefully sues news organizations for often just telling the truth.

Yet,  I still believe in freedom of speech as an almost absolute. Thomas Jefferson said regarding freedom of the press that “Our liberty depends on freedom of the press and cannot be limited without being lost.”  (My italics) And Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said there were few limits on freedom of speech, one exception being “free speech must not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a crowded theatre.”

            We also agree that it doesn’t extend to advocating the violent overthrow of the government or killing the president. There are laws against libel and slander, and although pornography is readily available on the internet, child pornography is a crime for both the purveyor and the consumer.

            But the antisemite, anti-Catholic, homophobe, Trumaphobe, sexist, Marxist (and whatever you would like to add) must be allowed to have their say. We may hate them and their views, but they must be permitted to vent, so that we can have our say without the government or our neighbors trying to stop us.     

Copyright 2026, Patrick F. Cannon