Free Speech Doesn’t Guarantee A Response, Or Prevent Us From Calling Out Bigotry

Heated Election Reveals Gross Misunderstanding Of 1st Amendment

A recent poll from Monmouth University showed that about 7 percent of voters have lost friends over this election. Surprisingly though, 7 percent is a pretty typical rate for lost friendships in any election cycle, not just this one. Even if that number’s not so high or surprising, the same poll showed that 70 percent of American voters say that this year’s presidential election has brought out the worst in people.  

For the most part, I’d agree that’s true. We’ve seen a huge upswing in anti-Semitism, racism, Islamophobia, transphobia, and of course, misogyny. And sadly, that’s nowhere near an inclusive list of the other forms of hatred we’ve seen lately. 

But I’m not going to spend my time here talking about why we should all be nicer to each other and swallow our pride in order to make nice with our neighbors. That’s someone else’s column, not mine. Instead, I want to clear up some fallacies about speech — engaging in it, not engaging in it, and the things I think too many folks have forgotten.

• Calling out hate speech isn’t a form of hate speech in itself. You don’t get to be offended that someone has reached the point where they can no longer accept your bigotry, racism or vulgarity. 
• Your right to free speech isn’t diminished when someone refuses to engage with you in person or online. Multiple times in the recent days I’ve seen people cry foul and insist that they are owed a response to an insulting question or statement. Let’s be clear: no one owes you anything.
• Your First Amendment rights go only so far as preventing government intrusion or prohibition. If someone chooses not to respond to your comments — or even if someone deletes your comments from an online page because they aren’t productive or they’re offensive — you have not lost one single right. You are not being silenced.
• People practicing self-care is not an assault on your freedom of speech. Most folks have limited capacity for engaging in an offensive and tiring conversation and will need to step back or end it as an act of self preservation. When that happens, accept it. Don’t criticize the other person as being closed-minded or unwilling to listen. They’ve given you all the time they can and now they need to keep themselves healthy. 

I think that so much of the nastiness we’ve seen lately is an outgrowth of a sense of entitlement. We mistakenly confuse our right to say anything we believe in any situation as a responsibility to say anything we want in any situation. What’s more, we believe that we deserve a response at all times, and when we don’t get it, we somehow convince ourselves that we’re the ones being put out. We demand so much from other people we ignore the reality of our words and our actions.  

So when I wrote a little bit earlier that this wasn’t going to be a column about how to be nicer and make friends with your neighbor I was a bit wrong. I’m still not going to say that it’s our job to be nice to our oppressors or even those who harass us, but I will remind us all of this: No one owes us anything. Not their time, not their money, not their conversation, not their bodies. When we’re lucky enough to get any of those things? It’s a privilege, and we should treat it as such.

Robbie Medwed is an Atlanta-based LGBT activist, educator, and writer, and probably won’t respond to your comments. His column appears here weekly. Follow him on Twitter: @rjmedwed