Only one side is afraid of open debate and pure freedom of speech. Why could that be?

Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman would like a word.

This was also a time when the majority (>50%) of Americans disapproved of mixed-race relationships, according to Gallup. That percentage only fell below 50% in 1993, IIRC.

Yes. Restrictions on what teachers are allowed to teach are restrictions on freedom of speech. Restrictions on non-sexual drag performances are restrictions of freedom of speech. Bans on calling for boycotts of Israeli goods and services are restrictions of the freedom of speech.

That goes double when we are talking about public employees whose conduct is directly the function of law.

In other words: you're allowed to restrict the speech of other people as long as you own private property. Turns out that freedom of speech in a liberal "democracy" is not all it's cracked up to be.

You are, of course, free to not take on the burden of employment from a particular organization if you find their demands on your conduct while they are compensating you for your time to be unacceptable.

This relationship is purely transactional. And, sorry, the idea that this is actually a bona fide problem is facile.

Liberal society loves to characterise itself as a rigid, well-structured system in which individuals choose to make idealised rational decisions to work towards their own interests. As opposed to emotional reasoning, which is conveniently implied to be the diametrical opposite of rational thought. And I call it "convenient" because as a result can easily paint protests and strikes, as "irrational" and "despicable" actions perpetrated by "unreasonable" individuals.

However, as soon as one considers the fact that the disparity of power between people with private property and people without makes it so that the people without private property cannot afford to make decisions on a "rational vacuum". We quickly find ourselves reverting back to "what are you going to do about it? You don't work, you don't eat."

However speech in the classroom is within the scope of your job duties. So my employer should not be able to fire me for wearing a Trump or Biden sticker off the clock, but it is fair to prohibit me from wearing it whilst on the job, and to sanction me if I'm proselytizing to customers during my duties

Pornography is pornography and pedophiles are pedophiles, but please, feel free to make your case for this.

Do you consider a curriculum to be a restriction on freedom of speech? I ask as a genuine question - being from the UK the norm for me is having a national curriculum and standard testing (albeit it executed by private-but-certified exam boards). It seems like common sense to me that obviously teachers have restrictions on what they can say in a classroom. Any employee does within their workplace and job duties, but teaching is one profession where I'd clearly expect a much higher level of restriction (along with the police, who represent the state, and doctors, who have duties of professionalism and to give medical advice only in line with the regulator, and various other regulated roles)

Do you claim those are not censorship?

I'm not taking a side here. Government censorship is bad. Full stop.

These are limited to the government itself. The "don't say gay," bill makes it illegal for teachers to teach sexual related stuff to elementary school kids. It's a form of self-governing (no pun intended) and isn't restricting the rights of citizens, which the first amendment protects. It's restricting what the government itself can do. Book bans are also limited to what the school library may carry and doesn't apply to public libraries or book stores and the like.

>requiring medical professionals to spout specific claims about the "harms" of pregnancy termination and a raft of other stuff too.

This is technically compelled speech rather than censorship. It's another concept I'm not overly comfortable with. To be fair, it's compelling a licensed physician to do this when performing his or her profession, which the government (and the people) has chosen to regulate. A physician wouldn't be compelled to do this outside his or her practicing medicine.

I think with things being cooler now, people are finding space to think, look back and criticize what their "group" said and worked for. And that's where people now start to be more vocally critical of what the COVID19 interventions looked like, or how "Defund The Police" movements panned out, etc.

At least that's my own reading of my own experience through all this. I'm not perfect and I would like to think I'm a free thinker. But I've been humbled by the last couple years, and found myself feeling stuck in a wave of social anger, unable to speak out and unable to think what seems to be right or wrong, stuck in allegiances. The end result for me right now is that I feel disgusted with mobs and anyone still holding unwavering intransigent views of what's right or wrong. But it's not like I was personally clear eyed enough during the worst of it to stand up to it.

I think framing this as being about speech with which one disagrees, or finds repugnant, is a bit disingenuous. It omits consideration of the possibility of speech that is genuinely harmful. For a few examples:

- My friends and I decide it'd be cool to put you in jail, so we report you as committing a serious crime that you didn't, and all give matching testimony that leads to your conviction.

- Pfizer starts selling a new drug that cures cancer. Except it turns out that they completely fabricated all the studies showing its effect, and actually the pills are nothing but placebos.

- A mugger with his hand in his pocket stops you at night and says, "Give me your wallet or I'll shoot you." You give him your wallet and he leaves.

I hope you would agree that these situations are... not ideal, and that the law should be able to discourage them. Despite the fact that all of these are, indisputably, speech.

Sure, I didn't mean to suggest that those things are legal. Just giving a few examples of speech that is harmful, rather than merely distasteful.

> The government would not have to intervene asking for censorship in any of these cases.

Hm, I think that may be pinning quite a lot on some questionable definition of "censorship."

In these examples the law would be banning some specific speech from me, Pfizer, and the mugger, and punishing us if we engaged in that banned speech anyway. Isn't that what censorship is?

That's the whole point: fraud, perjury, and several other harmful things are subcategories of speech.

The day's not over until you've been called a communist groomer and a Nazi.