The right to free speech
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Hey, it's Rund. In this month's ThruLine Plus episode, our producers take us behind the scenes of making our episode on the first transatlantic cable. To listen to these insider bonus episodes every month, sign up for ThruLine Plus at plus.npr.org slash ThruLine. This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from ThruLine and NPR. I'm Randa Abdelfattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in America that began 250 years ago this year. The Declaration of Independence heralded the beginning of the United States and its rupture from the King of England. It promised to become a democratic republic. And 11 years after the Declaration, the rubber hit the road, and the framers spent months writing the framework that would govern this new nation, the Constitution.
To this day, the U.S. Constitution is the country's guiding document. But we've also changed it 27 times over the years, the last time being in 1992. And those 27 amendments say a lot about how our country has evolved, who we say we are, and who we want to be. So today, Ramtin and I are going to take you back to the first edit to the Constitution, the First Amendment, the right to free speech. There is such a big gap in some ways between what the average American understands the First Amendment to say and to protect and what the law actually says. And in addition to that, the law is actually extremely confusing and changing every minute. The First Amendment remains one of our most cherished and confusing rights.
We'll explore why that is and the story of how it all began after a quick break.
December 15th, 1791. First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. 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 and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. While those words may sound simple enough, they've been at the center of political and cultural debates in the United States for centuries, especially that little clause about the freedom of speech. To understand the power and confusion behind those words, we sat down with George Washington University law professor and author of Fearless Speech, Breaking Free from the First Amendment, Mary Ann Franks.
We tend to use the shorthand sometimes and say, well, the First Amendment protects free speech. But if we look at the actual text of the First Amendment, it protects a bunch of things, namely five things. So it is about the freedom of religion. It's about freedom of the press. It's about the freedom of assembly. It's about the freedom to petition your government. And it's about the freedom of speech. So it does all of these things. And even when you just take apart any one of those, just take the free speech part, it's incredibly complicated. But what the text actually says is, Congress shall make no law upridging the freedom of speech. But if we just look at those words, that doesn't tell us much about what the modern First Amendment looks like.
And, like, maybe the most fundamental thing that it doesn't help us answer is, what is speech? Exactly. And not just what is speech, but, you know, the amendment could have been written to say, Congress shall make no law that infringes upon speech. But they actually said the freedom of speech— The debate among many scholars is, well, when you say the freedom of speech, it seems to indicate something a bit more abstract, that the freedom of speech meant something very specific perhaps to the founders when they were thinking about freedom of conscience and the ability to discuss certain types of criticisms of the government together. So it's a little bit of a black box. We don't really know what they meant by this.
What historical events shaped the First Amendment?
And that's still true today. We're still fighting over what exactly protected by freedom of speech means. And according to Marianne, that's sort of the underlying story of the First Amendment.
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