Ben Stein writes in his column today:
You can’t call members of various ethnic groups by slurring words that were common when I was a child. That’s called hate speech, and it’s barred by law in most if not all parts of the nation.
This is not true, and it’s a little astonishing that Ben believes this. Hate speech is very much protected by the First Amendment, as affirmed most famously in National Socialist Party of America v. Skokie (Described here). Speech codes at public universities have also been found unconstitutional, most notably in the widely-cited 1989 federal district court case Doe v. University of Michigan.
I wrote about flag-burning last year.
