I want you to be able to say whatever you'd like no matter how horrible without fear of government censorship; however, I will not let you use my printing press, blog, etc to do it.
>>I want you to be able to say whatever you'd like no matter how horrible without fear of government censorship; however, I will not let you use my printing press, blog, etc to do it.
I disagree. Should the New York Times leave their front door open and allow anyone to walk in off the street and write an un-vetted opinion piece and place it on the front page of tomorrow's paper? That would be ridiculous.
I don't see how you could then turn around and claim that NYT supporting freedom of speech is in any way a double standard. They aren't preventing you from creating your own paper, in which you can say whatever you like. When the government limits your speech, you don't have that option.
> Should the New York Times leave their front door open and allow anyone to walk in off the street and write an un-vetted opinion piece and place it on the front page of tomorrow's paper?
To elaborate, freedom of speech actually does mean the freedom to speak. If you're trying to speak and some asshole is yelling over you, you're being shut down.
> When the government limits your speech, you don't have that option.
More specifically, it's the government's job to protect that speech. When the government doesn't do that, it's nearly as egregious as when it actively censors speech. For instance, if you sent thugs around to threaten your critics, it's the government's job to stop that. There are a lot of angles by which they can justify doing so, and this is a relatively unused one (esp. because it's so abstract), but it's there.
edit: again, not sure why people are downvoting without explaining why.