AG Moody’s position on free speech off base

Douglas Soule, of the USA Today Network, reports that Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody has conveyed, in a legal brief defending state book banning, that “the state maintains the books on school shelves represent protected government speech” and that “public school libraries are ‘a forum for government speech,’ not a ‘forum for free expression.’”

This dangerous blather is the latest crank constitutional argument seeking to limit free speech and does massive disservice to both the notion of constitutionality and what constitutes an “argument.”

It is not an argument so much as an assertion, without evidence, that the state can do whatever it likes in terms of forcing an ideological purist’s view of the world into the minds of helpless students ― without regard as to its veracity, value, standards or any objective measure of its usefulness or interest to the students. Right now, in Florida, this ideology is a heavily skewed right-wing view — but if such nonsense is upheld, it could just as easily be operationalized by the looney left.

I am a supporter of the notion that people have the right to free speech and, further, that the value of considering certain private enterprises, such as corporations, as “fictitious people” far outweighs the dangers posed in their having rights as real people do. (Sorry, enemies of the Citizens United ruling, but corporation do, in fact, have a right to free speech.)  The argument for both types of rights are enshrined in practice and tradition as well as law.

People and corporations in the private sector have opinions – individuals have ideas and present them to the world – that’s protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution. They express themselves in all sorts of ways (art, the written word, and so on) as well as speech, and that, too, is protected as an individual right. But “The State” or “Government” in the United States, is not unitary. It cannot have a monolithic opinion, and as a result, it cannot express it. Not in libraries, nor anywhere else.

Authoritarian nations do control the books and materials used to educate their citizens, of course.  They do this because control of the narrative contributes heavily to control of the people, there.  But in the USA, our investment in freedoms supersedes almost everything else: freedom of thought, freedom of discussion, freedom to exchange ideas - and develop new ones through that interchange - has kept us at the forefront of a competitive world since 1789. And that’s what we should be teaching kids in our schools – and teaching them by example.

Here, government is not value-neutral, but is, rather value-diverse. We expect citizens to disagree – to battle it out – to sometimes compromise, but we hardly expect government, in the structural sense, to speak with one voice.

Individuals in government do have opinions, and express them in the public prints, over radio waves, on the internet, and in person. No one would argue that they shouldn’t. But they must never be allowed — collectively or individually ― to use the schools as a mouthpiece for their particular take on the world by controlling what kids can read. We encourage debate; disagreement fuels our ideas, opposition frames our deliberations; and having books and films and art representative of all views is important in nurturing this. Our society thrives because of a diversity of opinions and world views, not in spite of it. 

Government cannot have speech in the sense Moody is asserting. Government can pass laws, and make regulations, but these are subject to review under the Constitution, a hurdle that the Attorney General may be trying to dodge with this legal pretzel-logic.

To assert that the contents of libraries is the “speech” of government, and that this speech is not debatable, is to assert the central tenet of autocracy ― that the government can do whatever it pleases to restrict, guide, or ideologically control how, or about what, citizens think.

There’s right and wrong in all this, and this is wrong.

R. Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay Jr. endowed chair in American history, government and civics and Miller distinguished professor of political science at Florida Southern College.  He is also a columnist for The Ledger and political consultant and on-air commentator for WLKF Radio in Lakeland.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: AG Moody’s position on free speech off base