The American right to cuss the president

There is little question that Gary Bundy, a municipal court judge in New Jersey, violated the constitutional rights of Andrea Dick this month by ordering her to remove three banners emblazoned with crude messages about President Joe Biden.

The Supreme Court has made clear that the offending word Dick used in the banners, which she posted on her mother’s fence in Roselle Park, is legal in political statements. It ruled in a famous 1971 case that a draft protester had the right to wear a jacket with a message that one of his lawyers memorably described as “not actually advocating sexual intercourse with the Selective Service.”

Americans, especially judges, have an obligation to know the law. The limits of free speech are subject to debate, but Dick’s case does not approach those boundaries.

She has the right to curse out the president of the United States, and it should not require an appeals court to deliver that news to Roselle Park. The word Dick used is one that The New York Times often avoids publishing.

But the decision by a judge in a liberal town to constrain the free speech rights of an outspoken conservative is symptomatic of a troubling trend: a growing sense among many Americans that the United States cannot afford to maintain the full measure of its foundational commitment to free speech.

History shows that when faith in the value of free speech is eroded, the freedom is soon eroded, too.

Americans also are losing confidence that their political opponents will play by the same rules, undermining the argument that allowing others to speak is the best safeguard of one’s own right to do so.

Amid a rise in political violence, especially by right-wing extremists, there is also a growing impatience with the distinction between speech and violence. Twenty states with Republican-controlled legislatures have invoked the fear of violence as a justification for new laws cracking down on racial justice protests.

Florida, Iowa and Oklahoma passed laws granting immunity to drivers who strike protesters. Some of the same states also have recently enacted laws that seek to restrict instruction in public schools about the role of racism in the nation’s history.

There is no comparable effort by elected Democrats to impose legal restrictions on the expression of right-wing views, but it is increasingly common to hear the expression of intolerant views described as violence. Liberals also have sought to exclude viewpoints they regard as offensive from forums the recent campaign to ban Donald Trump from Twitter and Facebook.

The maintenance, or the restoration of healthy political discourse requires an uncompromising crackdown on anyone engaged in acts of political violence — and an uncompromising defense of political speech.

This year, Dick bought a number of anti-Biden banners with messages that range from the G-rated “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Trump,” right on up to what Bundy described as words that children are not asked to spell at spelling bees.

In the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision, Justice John Marshall Harlan II, defending the language on the anti-draft jacket, wrote that “one man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric.”

The truth in that case, of course, is that the word was intended as a vulgarity. It’s a safe bet that Dick bought the signs because she, too, wanted to offend her neighbors.

Neighbors complained to the mayor, who called a code enforcement officer who cited Dick’s mother, the house’s owner, for violating an ordinance that prohibits the display of “obscene material.” The signs stayed up and the town took her to court, where Bundy ordered her to remove three signs or face a fine of $250 per day.

The right to free speech must be balanced against other considerations, and the Supreme Court imposes a wide range of restrictions. The limits of free speech also are subject to debate.

This board strongly disagrees, for example, with the court’s view that corporate spending on political campaigns is a constitutionally protected from of free speech, but the animating spirit of the First Amendment is that the boundaries of free speech must remain as expansive as possible.