Only one side is afraid of open debate and pure freedom of speech. Why could that be?
Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman would like a word.
This was also a time when the majority (>50%) of Americans disapproved of mixed-race relationships, according to Gallup. That percentage only fell below 50% in 1993, IIRC.
Yes. Restrictions on what teachers are allowed to teach are restrictions on freedom of speech. Restrictions on non-sexual drag performances are restrictions of freedom of speech. Bans on calling for boycotts of Israeli goods and services are restrictions of the freedom of speech.
Do you consider a curriculum to be a restriction on freedom of speech? I ask as a genuine question - being from the UK the norm for me is having a national curriculum and standard testing (albeit it executed by private-but-certified exam boards). It seems like common sense to me that obviously teachers have restrictions on what they can say in a classroom. Any employee does within their workplace and job duties, but teaching is one profession where I'd clearly expect a much higher level of restriction (along with the police, who represent the state, and doctors, who have duties of professionalism and to give medical advice only in line with the regulator, and various other regulated roles)
That goes double when we are talking about public employees whose conduct is directly the function of law.
In other words: you're allowed to restrict the speech of other people as long as you own private property. Turns out that freedom of speech in a liberal "democracy" is not all it's cracked up to be.
You are, of course, free to not take on the burden of employment from a particular organization if you find their demands on your conduct while they are compensating you for your time to be unacceptable.
This relationship is purely transactional. And, sorry, the idea that this is actually a bona fide problem is facile.
However speech in the classroom is within the scope of your job duties. So my employer should not be able to fire me for wearing a Trump or Biden sticker off the clock, but it is fair to prohibit me from wearing it whilst on the job, and to sanction me if I'm proselytizing to customers during my duties
Do you claim those are not censorship?
I'm not taking a side here. Government censorship is bad. Full stop.
These are limited to the government itself. The "don't say gay," bill makes it illegal for teachers to teach sexual related stuff to elementary school kids. It's a form of self-governing (no pun intended) and isn't restricting the rights of citizens, which the first amendment protects. It's restricting what the government itself can do. Book bans are also limited to what the school library may carry and doesn't apply to public libraries or book stores and the like.
>requiring medical professionals to spout specific claims about the "harms" of pregnancy termination and a raft of other stuff too.
This is technically compelled speech rather than censorship. It's another concept I'm not overly comfortable with. To be fair, it's compelling a licensed physician to do this when performing his or her profession, which the government (and the people) has chosen to regulate. A physician wouldn't be compelled to do this outside his or her practicing medicine.
