No, Free Speech Doesn’t Mean Porn In Schools

PEN America, an international advocacy group for free expression, recently published an updated report about “book banning” in America. The group claims that school districts choosing not to carry particular books in their libraries “threaten[s] free expression and students’ first amendment rights.” The most common books that school districts have restricted student access to include “Gender Queer,” “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” and “Out of Darkness.” These books have been criticized as pornographic and promoting LGBT content. For example, “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a book aimed at adolescents, contains graphic descriptions of male homosexual sex.

PEN America argues that the removal of such books from school libraries “impede[s] free expression rights” and that such efforts do not “uphold free speech rights.” For PEN America, free expression rights “must be the bedrock of public schools in an open, inclusive, and democratic society.”

Such an understanding of free speech and free expression is wrong. Any sort of “free speech absolutism” that recognizes no limits is not the ideal for those concerned about ordered liberty. Men and women who care about their communities and their nation ought not to desire a public square that is laissez faire in its approach to speech. Just as true liberty is not license but liberty to do what is good, free speech is not freedom to degrade public morals. Speech expresses morals, and some morals — some ways of life — are beyond the pale for societies that are oriented to what is good and right and true.

Speech-Denying Nature Undermines the Nation

The American nation was built upon a conception of the world that recognized “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” There was an understanding by our nation’s founders that there are moral laws built into the fabric of the world that human beings ought to obey. Unfortunately, America in the modern day has lost any shared consensus about those laws of nature, or even whether there are moral laws at all. The sexual revolution has taken its toll on the public’s conception of morality. Recovering public morals will include a renewed recognition of the basic principles of the moral laws found in nature. The nature observable to the American founders is the same nature we can see today. Speech that denies nature itself — such as speech promoting sexual relations contrary to nature — undermines the very foundation upon which American society rests.

If a nation is to preserve itself, it must be willing to defend its moral foundation. Books that promote degenerate behavior, especially when they are targeted at children, ought not to be tolerated. For America, “free expression” that grossly violates “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God” acts like a jackhammer to America’s moral foundation, leaving it more like sand than rock, ready for the rising waters of late modernity to seep in and threaten destruction.

The idea of limiting expression in order to promote the moral foundations of society stretches from Plato to the American founders (and beyond). In discussing what

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