It just amazes me that this makes it past people’s smell test. Some of the same people who were defending Coulter’s right to “free speech” (as interpreted as her right to be paid by a private entity to give a speech to a particular assembled group of people in a particular place) can say, “Well, Fairooz broke the rules so them’s the breaks.”
The first amendment grants freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom to petition governments to address grievances. The law always cares more about the specific than the general, so the most important part of the first amendment is that last part - the freedom to petition government.
Freedom of speech has been interpreted in America as meaning that governments can’t regulate election spending. It’s been interpreted as saying that Hobby Lobby didn’t have to pay a tax because they didn’t like what that tax was being spent on. Freedom of speech has been seen to trump the most fundamental powers of government.
The idea that the most specific part of the first amendment is overridden by the desperate importance of removing someone who laughed is absolutely unfathomable.
If you are defending the very broad principle that people ought to be able to speak their minds in the case of Coulter, and that the government has to give you whatever licence plate you want in the “ASSIMIL8” case, but you are not willing to defend the extremely narrow principle that he government ought not arrest people for expressing displeasure with the government in this case, then you simply don’t give two fucks about the first amendment (or the general human right to free expression for those of us outside the US), it’s just a thin veneer over a worship of power.
