Why Constitutional Rights Require Citizens Willing to Fight for Freedom! By Charles Taylor (Florida)

The arrest of a 74-year-old Scottish grandmother for silently holding a sign reading "Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want" outside a Glasgow abortion clinic should send chills down the spine of anyone who values free expression. Rose Docherty's detention by four police officers for peaceful protest represents not an aberration in modern Britain, but the logical outcome of a system that treats constitutional rights as suggestions rather than inviolable principles.

This incident, along with thousands of similar prosecutions across Britain and Europe for online posts that wouldn't raise an eyebrow in America, illuminates a crucial truth about liberty: constitutional protections are only as strong as the people willing to defend them. The difference between American and European approaches to free speech isn't merely academic, it's the difference between viewing rights as natural and inalienable versus treating them as privileges granted by government and revocable at convenience.

The American First Amendment declares with crystalline clarity: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." No exceptions. No asterisks. No conditions about protecting "public safety" or preventing "disorder," the elastic terms that European authorities use to justify their speech suppressions.

Britain's Article 10, by contrast, promises free expression while simultaneously providing a roadmap for its destruction. Citizens may express themselves "freely without government interference" except when authorities decide speech threatens "national security," "public safety," "health or morals," or might "encourage racial or religious hatred." These vague, expandable categories give bureaucrats unlimited discretion to define dissent as dangerous.

Yet here's the uncomfortable reality: even America's seemingly absolute protection exists only on paper. Constitutional text, no matter how elegantly crafted, cannot enforce itself. It requires human agents, judges, legislators, police officers, and ultimately citizens, to respect and uphold its commands. When those agents decide the constitution is inconvenient, parchment becomes powerless.

History provides sobering examples of constitutional rights evaporating when governments decide they're obstacles rather than obligations. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 criminalised criticism of the federal government, making a mockery of the First Amendment barely seven years after its ratification. During World War I, the Espionage Act sent Americans to prison for opposing the war effort. Japanese-American internment during World War II proceeded despite the Fifth Amendment's due process guarantees.

More recently, we've witnessed troubling erosions from multiple directions. Progressive activists demand restrictions on "hate speech" and "misinformation," while conservative politicians threaten to deport student protesters and denounce journalists as "enemies of the people." Both sides seem perfectly willing to abandon constitutional principles when those principles protect their opponents' rights to speak.

The current immigration debate reveals this dynamic clearly. When Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that habeas corpus, the constitutional right requiring government to justify detention, actually gives the president power to "remove people from this country," she demonstrated how easily officials can turn constitutional protections on their heads. If those in power can simply redefine constitutional language to mean its opposite, what protection does any text provide?

Europe's trajectory offers a preview of where constitutional weakness leads. European nations, lacking America's tradition of robust speech protection, have constructed elaborate regulatory frameworks to combat "disinformation" and "hate speech." The result isn't a more enlightened discourse, but a chilling atmosphere where citizens self-censor for fear of prosecution.

When governments become judges of truth, they inevitably define truth as whatever serves their interests. Today's "misinformation" becomes tomorrow's accepted fact. Yesterday's heresy becomes today's orthodoxy. The Scottish grandmother holding her gentle sign discovered what happens when authorities claim the power to determine which peaceful expressions society may tolerate.

The European Union's Digital Services Act and similar regulations represent the institutionalisation of censorship. By requiring platforms to remove "illegal content," defined broadly enough to encompass virtually any controversial statement, European authorities have created a system of prior restraint that American courts would strike down immediately. Yet Europeans accept these restrictions because they've been conditioned to view free speech as a privilege that must yield to other social goods.

This brings us to the fundamental question: what actually protects liberty? Not constitutional text alone, clearly. Constitutions can be ignored, reinterpreted, or formally amended. Courts can be packed or intimidated. Legislators can be bought or coerced.

The only reliable guardian of constitutional rights is a citizenry that understands their value and refuses to surrender them. This requires more than passive appreciation for liberty in the abstract. It demands active engagement, voting, lobbying, protesting, and when necessary, civil disobedience. It means supporting free speech even when we despise the speaker's message, defending due process even for the accused we consider guilty, and protecting constitutional principles even when they obstruct policies we favour.

Most critically, it requires citizens willing to pay personal costs to preserve collective freedoms. The Scottish grandmother could have stayed home rather than risk arrest. The Americans prosecuted under the Espionage Act could have remained silent. They chose instead to bear witness, knowing that liberty dies when good people do nothing.

Opening the Constitution for revision in today's polarised climate, where both major parties have demonstrated contempt for constitutional limits when those limits frustrate their agendas, would likely produce a document far weaker than what we have.

As the current article notes, conservatives who once championed originalism now dismiss due process when it comes to immigration. Progressives who once opposed government censorship now demand restrictions on "harmful" speech. Neither side can be trusted to strengthen constitutional protections when both have shown eagerness to weaken them.

The founders understood this dynamic. They created a system designed to function even when populated by imperfect people pursuing selfish interests. But they also recognized that no system could survive the complete abandonment of civic virtue. As Benjamin Franklin reportedly warned, they had given Americans "a republic, if you can keep it."

We stand at a crossroads. The West can follow Europe's path toward managed speech and regulated thought, trusting authorities to determine which ideas deserve protection. Or we can recommit to the harder path of defending liberty even when it's inconvenient, even when it protects speech we find offensive, even when it requires personal sacrifice.

The choice isn't between order and chaos, as speech restrictionists claim. It's between freedom and control. Justice Louis Brandeis captured the stakes perfectly in Whitney v. California: "Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty... the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

Constitutional protections matter enormously, they provide the legal framework within which liberty can flourish. But ultimately, freedom survives only when free people choose to keep it alive. The 74-year-old grandmother in Glasgow understood this.

The parchment barrier of constitutional text provides crucial protection, but it cannot stand alone. Behind every constitutional right must stand citizens willing to fight for it, in courts, in legislatures, in the streets, and if necessary, with their lives. That willingness, more than any legal document, is what separates free societies from unfree ones.

Liberty is not a gift from government. It's not even a gift from the founders. It's a responsibility that each generation must shoulder anew, understanding that freedom's price is not just eternal vigilance, but eternal struggle. The alternative is clear enough from Scotland's example: a world where peaceful grandmothers get arrested for holding signs, and the rest of us learn to hold our tongues.

https://reason.com/2025/05/30/british-attacks-on-free-speech-prove-the-value-of-the-first-amendment/

"Political activists occasionally propose a new constitutional convention, which would gather delegates from the states to craft amendments to the nation's founding document. It's a long and convoluted process, but the Constitution itself provides the blueprint. Article V allows such a confab if two-thirds of Congress or two-thirds of the state legislatures call for one.

These days, conservatives are the driving force for the idea, as they see it as a means to put further limits on the federal government. Sometimes, progressives propose such a thing. Their goals are to enshrine various social programs and social-justice concepts. Yet anyone who has watched the moronic sausage-making in Congress and state legislatures should be wary of opening Pandora's Box.

I'd be happy enough if both political tribes tried to uphold the Constitution as it is currently drafted. It's a brilliant document that limits the power of the government to infringe on our rights. Without the first 10—the Bill of Rights—this would be a markedly different nation.

For a sense of where we might be without it, I'd recommend looking at Great Britain and its approach to the speech concepts detailed on our First Amendment. Our nation was spawned from the British, so we share a culture and history. Yet, without a specific constitutional dictate, that nation has taken a disturbing approach that rightly offends American sensibilities.

As Tablet magazine reported, "74-year-old Scottish grandmother Rose Docherty was arrested on video by four police officers for silently holding a sign in proximity to a Glasgow abortion clinic reading 'Coercion is a crime, here to talk, only if you want.'" Thousands of Brits are detained, questioned, and prosecuted, it notes, for online posts of the type that wouldn't raise an eyebrow here. The chilling effect is profound.

This isn't as awful as what happens in authoritarian countries such as Russia, where the government's critics have a habit of accidentally falling out of windows. But that's thin gruel. Britain and the European Union are supposed to be free countries. Their speech codes are intended to battle disinformation/misinformation, but empowering the government to be the arbiter of such vague concepts only destroys everyone's freedoms.

In 1998, Great Britain approved Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It protects a citizen's "right to hold your own opinions and to express them freely without government interference." But it comes with limits and conditions.

The authorities may quash such speech to "protect national security, territorial integrity (the borders of the state) or public safety," or "prevent disorder or crime," or "protect health or morals," or "maintain the authority and impartiality of judges." One may not express "views that encourage racial or religious hatred." Those are open-ended terms, which has led to bizarre prosecutions.

Our First Amendment includes these words: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble." A constitutional amendment stating "no law" is more protective than a statute with asterisks and exceptions.

With the political Left devoted to limiting speech based on its fixations on race and gender and the political Right's willingness to, say, deport students who take verboten positions on the war in Gaza and malign reporters as enemies of the people, I'd hate to see how speech protections would fare in a refashioned constitution. Traditionally, the Left has taken a "living and breathing" approach, insisting its plain words and founders' intent are up for reinterpretation.

Sadly, modern conservatives, who previously defended originalism, seem ready to ditch the Constitution when it hinders their policy aims. Just read their dissing of due process—as stated in the 5th and 14th amendments, when it comes to immigration policy. When asked about habeas corpus during a Senate hearing, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said it's "a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country."

It's the opposite, as habeas corpus requires the government to explain why it's detaining people—and forbids it from holding them indefinitely. MAGA apparently believes the words of the Constitution mean the opposite of what they say. Frankly, I wouldn't want either side to be near a constitutional convention that's empowered to rewrite a document penned by men more brilliant and civic-minded than our current lot.

"Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards," wrote Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in the 1927 free-speech case, Whitney v. California. "They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. … If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."