Speech & equality1996
Do We Really Have to Choose?
by Norman Dorsen
Conflict is the essence of civil liberty. Individual or group rights are rarely, if ever, willingly bestowed without a struggle. From the day that King John was forced at Runnymede to recognize that his barons had certain prerogatives to the present era, when racial minorities, women, and gays and lesbians fight for a place at the table, the din of political, judicial, and sometimes violent battle echoes through the United States.
And yet, are the law of freedom of speech and the law of equality truly on a collision course? Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has written that the strongest argument for regulating speech is the unreflective stupidity of most of the arguments for the other side - the tendency of those "who invoke the First Amendment mantra, and seem immediately to fall into a trance,...