Doesn the first amendment protect the right of the Italian organizers to have their parade?
To be clear, we support and defend the rights granted to all of us by virtue of the first amendment. We strongly affirm the right of all people to create a marketplace of ideas that stimulates and strengthens democracy. However, we do not accept hate speech, and more specifically, the state-sponsored celebration of Columbus as a valid expression of this right. In particular, the first amendment cannot, and should not, be applied in a capricious or uncritical manner in all circumstances. Doing so overlooks the very real inequalities of power which surround us. These unequal positions of power affect our abilities to access, express, defend and assert our rights (such as the first amendment). What’s more they affect the degree to which our expressions are heard, the authority they carry, and the manner in which they impact our society. For example, we would never accept the argument that a slave’s actual right to object to slavery was ever equal to the slaveholder’s verbal defense of sla
