This isn't just a liberal position, though the clamoring of busy gutmensch in Universities would have you believe otherwise. Indeed, here's an interesting excerpt from an article by William Haun over at Law & Liberty:
After Nazis marched on the largely Jewish neighborhood of Skokie, Illinois in 1977, William F. Buckley, Jr. possessed the moral confidence in self-government to repudiate the suggestion that “we indulge the little tyrants.” A Nazi march through a largely Jewish neighborhood, or a KKK march through the streets of Harlem, has the worth to self-government of “an obscene phone call.” Rather than hide such speech “under the umbrella of the First Amendment,” Buckley said “the moral is that little boys should not be given dangerous toys.”
What if it was the case that conservatives generally accepted the narrative that it is acceptable to limit free speech? What would American history have looked like if early twentieth century jurists like Holmes, Jr. did not set us on the path of a sort of free speech absolutism, that has led us to this weird position where hardcore pornography & grindcore are perfectly protected expressions available widely throughout the internet, but "hate speech" looks to be slated to be axed?
The great conservative & traditionalist legal mind of our time, Adrian Vermeule, when he was proposing that conservatives abandon some of their originalism and brought forward a fascinating example in an article in the Atlantic, that gives us a glimpse of where that ultimately may have gone:
Alternatives to originalism have always existed on the right, loosely defined. One is libertarian (or “classical liberal”) constitutionalism, which emphasizes principles of individual freedom that are often in uneasy tension with the Constitution’s original meaning and the founding generation’s norms. The founding era was hardly libertarian on a number of fronts that loom large today, such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion; consider that in 1811, the New York courts, in an opinion written by the influential early jurist Chancellor James Kent, upheld a conviction for blasphemy against Jesus Christ as an offense against the public peace and morals.
The precedent would have been quite clear: the forbidding of blasphemous speech that offended the masses and served no purpose other than to enrage, something that far right speech that agitates on the topic of race is accused of doing.
The comparison is quite apt: if words hurt, then the N-word is not the only word which inflicts damage. Blasphemous treatment of God (or gods) can inflict emotional distress. I think many of us can even attest to having felt uncomfortable when our religion was insulted, or even when losing our religions. These words are so powerful that I have heard atheist parents tell stories about their children weeping when they hear them say that they do not think that heaven is real.
Moreover, we can look at incidents in Europe like the Charlie Hebdo shooting or the Denmark riots triggered by the content in Jyllands-Posten that were critical of Islam, or the international riots that were started when the Innocence of Muslims was released in 2012.
Denmark Riots
Speech bigoted against religion can trigger violence and rioting just as how racist speech can trigger violence and rioting, yet nobody is pushing to reinstate anti-blasphemy laws or get outspoken atheists fired for their rhetoric.
Ultimately, the lack of outrage shows an imbalance of power in the West, and how the new god of the American people is liberalism and not Christ. Once upon a time, and perhaps as recently as the 1980s when there was the famous "Satanic panic," the Christian right could really mount a devastating charge against their opponents in the name of free speech, but it seemed that they were sincerely convinced of the freedom of conscience for their enemies. Perhaps this is because of St. Gamaliel the Elder, who urged the Sanhedrin to listen to the Christians because it would be of no harm if they were wrong and of great benefit to all if they were right, or perhaps it is because of the story of the Prodigal Son,that speaks of the power of men to reconsider things in the end, and does not propose at all the limiting of a man's liberty to force upon them something that they do not wish.
Christians in the West ultimately felt it was OK to let go of authoritarian solutions to curbing sharp criticism, and they decided to turn the other cheek. Yet, the more secular and humanist Western society has become, the more the call for outright illegalizing and having zero public tolerance for dissent on issues of equality has shot up.
Personally, I speculate that it has a lot to do with the way that secular humanism, believing in no God of the Universe, no cosmic justice, feels that it is their duty to actually fight in the here & now. There simply is no second act in which they will be able to count on justice. Moreover, leftism is an ersatz-religion, and while the key to salvation for a Christian is the individual moral improvement and relationship with God, the path to redemption for secular humanists are all directed towards the state of society.
There is no utopia after death, nor is justice meted out to the great sinners. Because racist white segregationists and slave owners that died decades ago have no hell to burn in, we have to create a furnace to throw them into on Earth just as much as we have to strive for Utopia.
However, these efforts to ban and expel people for a certain kind of speech, and to use Antifa and other means to mete out "street justice" to them as if they were pedophiles are generally ill thought out. They retroactively vindicate all historical blasphemy laws and violent movements against Communists.
After all, if it is evil to deny someone's full humanity through racism, is it not also completely evil to deny the Gospel of Christ, which brings grace to all the world, and to actively encourage people to indulge in their sins, sins that are fundamentally demonic? For the removal of freedom of another is a political tool, ultimately. It is a statement about what society should tolerate, and when we give permission to one side to be intolerant of the other, we ultimately signal that we believe man is not capable of deciding for himself and some things are too far gone to be tolerated.
To the far leftists, it is racism and sexism. To the Christians and Muslims, it may be blasphemy. The push to curb hate speech and to be increasingly intolerant of anyone remotely associated with it invites a great backlash from Christians, Muslims, and other conservative forces to propose bringing back blasphemy laws.
Indeed, if debate & discussion in the marketplace of ideas is no longer the means of settling the score, the conservative forces need to demand to have a say in crafting legislation that will illegalize bigotry against them and also protect them from similar accusations. Failure to do so would ultimately be irresponsible. While hate speech for me, blasphemy for thee is not a serious legal vision that any Westerner truly wants, it's the final recourse for disempowered conservative minorities to gain some semblance of equality in their states.
A closing observation: it would be considered absurd in the 1990s to have argued that the First Amendment would eventually be under assault if we allowed for the mainstreaming of Marxist and Marx-symp thought. It would sound like some exaggerated McCarthyist claim.
But here we are... in 2020... with renewed battles over what should be permitted to post on social media, and increased calls for European-style limitations to free speech.
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