What's Just as Important as Free Speech? A Few Things, Actually.

on Apr 1, 2025

SAN DIEGO -- I occasionally find myself speaking to Latino immigrants, legal and otherwise.

I don't waste time telling those folks about their rights. That information is important, but they can get it from immigration lawyers or Spanish-language media.

Instead, I tell the migrants about something they're not likely to hear much about while living in the United States: their responsibilities, including the obligations they have to the country that took them in.

They're not the only ones who didn't get that memo. Native-born Americans -- those of us who won the geography lottery in the delivery room, receiving the golden ticket of U.S. citizenship through no effort on our part -- will drone on about our right to this or that.

But many of us don't understand that with these rights we love to invoke come a litany of responsibilities -- to ourselves, our country, our society and our fellow human beings.

That message didn't get through to the U.S. citizens who -- in the summer of 2020 -- disgraced themselves by burning down police stations as part of the civil unrest in response to the murder of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

Nor did it sink in with the U.S. citizens who -- on Jan. 6, 2021 -- stormed and vandalized the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn a presidential election, knocking law enforcement officers to the ground and threatening to kill them with their own guns.

With each of those travesties, there were individuals on the right and the left who defended violent acts as expressions of free speech.

All this comes to mind as I think about a topic that has been close to my heart for 40 years. It was back in the mid-1980s, when I was in high school, that I discovered the subject of civil liberties.

In a used bookstore, I found a pair of tattered paperback books published by the American Civil Liberties Union. The national organization was founded in 1920 to defend rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The books spelled out the rights of public school teachers and students. I devoured them, along with anything else I could find on the subject. Later, in college, I took courses at Harvard Law School -- but only on civil rights and civil liberties.

At some point, I decided to become a civil liberties lawyer. Whenever government infringed on the right to due process, freedom of religion or freedom of speech, I'd push back. That was the plan. And as the saying goes, when I shared it with God, the big guy laughed. Instead, I became a writer, author, journalist and columnist.

I say all this to make clear that I do not take lightly what I'm about to argue, and what I believe now.

First, that free speech isn't a blank check. The First Amendment isn't a shield for obscenity, defamation, harassment, direct threats, incitement to engage in lawlessness or "fighting words" expressed face-to-face.

And second, that there are other things that are just as important to our country and our people as free speech. Things like: Respect. Comity. Manners. Decency. Societal cohesion. Common sense.

The Trump administration's crackdown on international students -- including the revocation of hundreds of visas by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has the legal authority to do so if a visa holder's actions undermine U.S. foreign policy -- has dragged Americans into a thorny debate over free speech on college and university campuses.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, conservative thinker David French shared his concerns.

"Just as we rightly look back in shame at the excesses of McCarthyism, we will look back in shame at the excesses of this moment -- if we permit anger at campus protests to overwhelm our commitment to due process and free speech," French wrote.

Yet not all student activists are the same.

Some of them merely expressed support for Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israeli forces intent on destroying Hamas to prevent a recurrence of the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023. There is nothing wrong with that.

But others have spewed antisemitism, harassed Jewish students, taken over buildings, assaulted university personnel and threatened to spark a holy war in the United States. There is a lot wrong with that.

Don't misunderstand. The Constitution matters. Of course it does. But it's only part of what makes us Americans. The other parts deserve -- to borrow a phrase -- equal protection.

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To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.