It was a felony to teach women how to use birth control to prevent pregnancy from happening. And they went undercover to visit doctors as cops. I’m not talking about abortion; I’m talking about condoms and prophylactics. It was a felony to explain this to people. It was a felony to mail them information about using this to people. In the Adam’s administration, the second president, it was a felony to criticize the government. The Sedition Act, the very first thing that was censored under our beloved constitution was political speech to criticize the government.
This claim that the most important thing that the First Amendment protects is political speech might be true culturally, it is completely false historically because that is the first thing that they targeted, and understandably so. There were books, Ulysses is an example, where it was illegal to mail them. And this isn’t antebellum confederacy times. This is the 20th century. And also, another thing conservatives don’t like – I’m not saying you’re a conservative – is that the free speech league in these early organizations that were organized to promote this kind of discourse were commies.
And not like lefties like I mean today. I mean literal communists. Teddy Roosevelt wanted people deported and he succeeded in doing so for having views that he regarded as anathema. That fire in a movie theater, crowded theater quote, was about people saying that the draft was unconstitutional. And the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that it’s okay to censor that. So, this boomer kind of claim that we used to have this perspective on free discourse is a complete lie and is as a-historic as The 1619 Project. America and pretty much every culture has always and has to have some kind of censorious aspect to it.
Now there is certain pockets where free discourse is much more accepted than in others. And that’s broadly speaking a great thing. But this claim that we’re ever going to be at a place where all the ideas are on the table is not only crazy, but I think undesirable because I don’t want to have destigmatized for people to be discussing sexuality with children.
