schmevil | All speech is not free

Because she says it so clearly. From, All Speech Is Not Free: The Ethics of "Affirmative Action" Pedagogy, Megan Boler:

All speech is not free. Power inequities institutionalized through economies, gender roles, social class, and corporate-owned media ensure that all voices do not carry the same weight. Within Western democracies, different voices pay different prices for the words they choose to utter. Some speech will result in the speaker being assaulted or even killed. Other speech is not free in the sense that it is foreclosed: Our social and political culture predetermines certain voices and articulations as unrecognizable, illegitimate, unspeakable.

Similarly, not all expressions of hostility are equal. Some hostile voices are penalized while others are tolerated. Hostility that targets marginalized people on the basis of their assumed inferiority carries more weight than hostility expressed by a marginalized person toward a member of the dominant class. Efforts to legislate against 'hate speech' within public spaces cannot, in principle, recognize the differential weight of hate speech directed at different individuals or groups.

If all speech is not free, then in what sense can one claim that freedom of speech is a working constitutional right? If free speech is not effective in practice, then a historicized ethics is required. Thus, the discomforting paradox of US democracy becomes apparent: While we may desire a principle of equality that applies in exactly the same way to every citizen, in a society where equality is not guaranteed, we required historically sensitive principles that may appear to contradict the ideal of 'equality'. An historical ethics operates toward the ideal of principles such as constitutional rights, but it also recognizes the need to develop ethical principles that take into account that not all persons have equal protection under the law or equal access to resources.