If the Constitution Were Written Like Campus Speech Codes
Religion & Liberty Online

If the Constitution Were Written Like Campus Speech Codes

“Limits on free speech is uniquely troubling for the future health of a free society,” wrote Ray Nothstine in an Acton Commentary. “Students become accustomed to having their rights limited, and will be more lethargic in countering possible oppression from a growing and intrusive state.”

Nothstine wrote those words in 2008 — and they’ve proven to be distressingly prophetic. Every year for the past decade limitations on speech by students has been increasing, leading an entire generation to assume such restriction are to be expected.

Fortunately, this country’s founding generation did not take the limitations of their freedoms so lightly. But what if  our constitution had been written like campus speech codes?

 

Joe Carter

Joe Carter is a Senior Editor at the Acton Institute. Joe also serves as an editor at the The Gospel Coalition, a communications specialist for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and as an adjunct professor of journalism at Patrick Henry College. He is the editor of the NIV Lifehacks Bible and co-author of How to Argue like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator (Crossway).