Hate is everywhere! Everywhere you turn there will always be people who hate you, your ideas, or everything. As a High School student, hate surrounds me in digital forms and physical forms. I see bullies in real life and homophobic people on my Twitter Timeline. They both share one thing in common: the first amendment. The ability to speak freely is written in the bill of rights and has been preserved for decades, but when free speech turns into hate speech it brings up the widely deliberated issue about banning hate speech. There are many different perspectives on the issue of hate speech. Author of Hate Speech is Free Speech, Gov. Dean and Law professor, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, applies a strong historical perspective on the situation arguing that people are “constitutionally illiter[ate]” when they make the claim that hate speech is not part of the First Amendment. Believing that it is impossible to ban hate speech because everyone will always disagree with any idea, Reynolds focuses on the problems with banning hate speech and what might happen if hate …show more content…
Reynolds defines hate speech as something that is very difficult to define because there is never going to be an idea or opinion that everybody agrees with without any contradiction. He states that hate speech is “meaningless” and is just a form of speech that people contradict. He parallels hate speech to “racist, sexist, or poor in taste”, but doesn 't explicitly say that hate speech is exactly that. Additionally, Reynolds says that fighting words are not considered hate speech, but rather an allurement to fight one-on-one. Reynolds is basically saying that there is no such of a thing as hate speech because all speech is protected whether it is homophobic, racist, sexist etc. Although he correlates racist and sexist ideas to hate speech, his definition is very broad and is open to a variety of