As Holmes went on to put it: "If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition." Censorship is thus a kind of social instinct. As caring and responsible citizens of society, especially good and decent citizens of a good and decent society, we are likely to want many results with all our hearts. We want security, we want freedom from fear, we want order, civility, racial and religious tolerance, we want the well-being of our children. We want these things with all our hearts, and when others express opinions that seem to threaten these aspirations, who can blame us for being tempted to express our wishes in law and sweep away the opposition? It is perfectly logical. And that is what, at bottom, freedom of speech is all about.

Over the course of roughly the last 50 years the U.S. Supreme Court has set our nation on a remarkable experiment, often construing the First Amendment in a manner that strenuously defies the natural and logical impulse to censor. In scores of decisions, the Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment in a manner that to most of the world seems positively radical. Those decisions are numerous and cover a vast and various terrain, but consider some highlights. Americans have the right to:


Desecrate the national flag as a symbol of protest.
Burn the cross as an expression of racial bigotry and hatred.
Espouse the violent overthrow of the government as long as it is mere abstract advocacy and not an immediate incitement to violence.
Traffic in sexually explicit erotica as long as it does not meet a rigorous definition of "hard core" obscenity.
Defame public officials and public figures with falsehoods provided they are not published with knowledge of their falsity or reckless disregard for the truth.
Disseminate information invading personal privacy if the revelation is deemed "newsworthy."
Engage in countless other forms of expression that would be outlawed in many nations but are regarded as constitutionally protected here.

Such First Amendment decisions reject the impulse to censor; they are therefore striking as legal doctrines. Perhaps more striking, however, is that these decisions have gained widespread currency within American culture as a whole. The Supreme Court is not alone in its commitment to the free-speech project. While undoubtedly any one decision will often be controversial with the public, which may be deeply divided on topics such as flag-burning or sex on the Internet, on balance what is extraordinary about the evolution of freedom of speech in America over the last 50 years is that it has taken such a strong hold on the American consciousness, a hold that seems to cut across party labels such as "Democrat" or "Republican" or ideological labels such as "liberal" or "conservative." On the Supreme Court itself, for example, justices with hardy conservative credentials such as Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas have often been as committed to expansive protection for freedom of speech as justices famous for their liberal views, such as William Brennan or Thurgood Marshall. Appointees of Republican presidents, such as Anthony Kennedy or David Souter, have been as stalwart as appointees of Democratic presidents, such as Stephen Breyer or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in their articulation of strong free-speech doctrines. So too, in the political arena, views on free-speech issues often do not track along traditional party lines or classic ideological divisions.

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/Speech/overview.aspx