Congressman Tom McClintock
The vile ideology of antisemitism and hatred has grown on the political left to the point it has now permeated the House of Representatives. The congressional apologists for Hamas and its aim to obliterate Israel would destroy all of Western Civilization if allowed to have their way. Anyone who doubts that need only look at the atrocities and horror Hamas unleashed on the peaceful neighborhoods of Israel on October 7th.
There are no words strong enough to adequately express contempt and disgust for this ideology and its adherents in the House. It should be denounced and marginalized within Congress and its advocates should be removed from office by the constituencies who sent them here.
But punishing members of Congress for their political views – even the most extreme and objectionable views – is a slippery slope we must avoid for our own sakes.
There are only two ways to resolve disputes and differences among human beings. There is reason and there is force. The American Founders built an empire of reason enshrined in the First Amendment. Freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, and of peaceful assembly are the very tools that Americans have used for two and a half centuries to resolve our differences and chart a path to a better future.
Speech can be ugly, disgusting, hateful, prejudiced and alarming. But it can never be dangerous to a free society as long as men and women of good will have the freedom of speech to dispute it, challenge it and reject it.
Suppressing speech — even the most hate-filled speech — doesn’t diminish its influence. It strengthens it. The weakest course a society can take is to forbid the expression of unpopular ideas. The strongest thing we can do is to confront them and defeat them on the merits. If we allow our society to become a society where men and women may not speak their minds, we will have lost the very quality that gives our country its strength.
In the 1960’s and ’70’s, the ACLU was not the partisan organization it has become today. In those days it was a principled defender of the civil rights of every American. And in those days, it vigorously defended the right of neo-Nazis who expressed much the same ideology we hear from the apologists for Hamas in our streets and in Congress. The ACLU’s leadership included many prominent Jews and the Holocaust was a fresh and vivid memory. Yet they defended the right of self-proclaimed Nazis to express their abhorrent and hateful ideology. They did so for a simple reason. As long as the rights of the worst among us are protected, the same right is safe for the rest of us. Indeed, it is that very right that protects US from THEM.
The United States Capitol, which stands as a symbol of the highest aspirations of mankind, was built for one reason and one reason only. Its sole purpose is to provide a place where we can talk out and resolve our differences by reasoning together. Freedom of speech is the only way that we can sort out truth from falsehood or wisdom from folly. Our democracy depends on it.
It doesn’t work perfectly. But it works.
It will cease to work the moment we begin punishing speech — and especially what has come to be known as “hate speech.” It is a very short step from banning “hate speech” to banning speech we hate. It is a course that would ultimately change the nature of Congress as an institution and forfeit the legacy of freedom for which our generation is now the steward.
In Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons,” William Roper vows to “cut down every law in England” to get at the Devil. Sir Thomas More replies,
“Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
Both parties have a lunatic fringe we must control. But we cannot control it by force. Only by reason. We can control it by denouncing it in the strongest possible terms, appealing to the better angels of our nature, and isolating and marginalizing it so all people of good will can recognize it for the evil it is and defeat it both at the ballot box and in the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens.
