Not being allowed to say what you believe is a violation of your freedom of speech. But another kind of violation of your freedom of speech is compelled speech, being forced to say something that you do not believe.
Today speech is being compelled in the mandates to support the LGBTQ+ cause, as enforced by anti-discrimination laws and by social pressure to celebrate “Pride Month.”
But the law cannot force you to say or express something that goes against your beliefs. That was the Supreme Court’s ruling in 303 Creative v. Elenis, which upheld the right of a website designer to refuse to build websites celebrating same-sex weddings.
Comments The Federalist‘s Jordan Boyd, quoting Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion:
Activists have tried for years to weaponize Colorado’s sweeping “antidiscrimination” laws to punish people like [website designer Lorie] Smith and Masterpiece Cakeshop cake artist Jack Phillips for wrongthink.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, however, affirmed in the court’s majority opinion that the government can’t force Smith to make wedding websites celebrating same-sex couples because it would violate her constitutional right to exercise her Christian belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.
“The First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands. Because Colorado seeks to deny that promise, the judgment is reversed,” Gorsuch wrote.
Read Gorsuch’s opinion, including his devastating refutation of Justice Sonia Sotomayer’s dissent.
The ruling applies also to Jack Phillips’ refusal to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. It may have little effect on compelled speech in the private sector, as when a corporation requires its employees to express support for the Pride agenda. And it will do nothing for speech compelled not by the government but by peer pressure. Our problem is that we now lack a cultural ethos of free speech.
Interestingly, Luther also addresses the issue of compelled speech. In Temporal Authority: The Extent to Which It Should Be Obeyed, Luther discusses the futility of rulers presuming to require their citizens to confess one religion or another. He makes the important–and historically influential to the cause of liberty–point that thoughts cannot be coerced:
Besides, the blind, wretched folk do not see how utterly hopeless and impossible a thing they are attempting. For no matter how much they fret and fume, they cannot do more than make the people obey them by word and deed; the heart they cannot constrain, though they wear themselves out trying. For the proverb is true, “Thoughts are free.” Why then would they constrain people to believe from the heart, when they see that it is impossible? In this way they compel weak consciences to lie, to deny, and to say what they do not believe in their hearts, and they load themselves down with dreadful alien sins. For all the lies and false confessions which such weak consciences utter fall back upon him who compels them. lt were far better, if their subjects erred, simply to let them err, than that they should constrain them to lie and to say what is not in their hearts; neither is it right to defend evil with what is worse. (p. 254)
This happens to be the 500th anniversary of Luther’s Temporal Authority, a treatise in which he develops his theology of the Two Kingdoms. I’ve been reading it for a project I am working on, and I have been astonished at the way it addresses contemporary topics. I’ll be blogging about that in the weeks ahead.
Photo: Justice Neil Gorsuch by Franz Jantzen, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States – https://www.oyez.org/justices/neil_gorsuch, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60210393
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In