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First Amendment

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• Originally published 10/02/2017

  Flip-Flopping on Free Speech

  Jill Lepore

  The fight for the First Amendment, on campuses and football fields, from the sixties to today.

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• Originally published 03/07/2017

  The press was way more political in Jefferson's day - but he defended it anyway

  John Fea

  The Founding Father had his problems with the press. But what he didn't note was that despite his agitation with the press, he defended a much more biased press as a necessary part of free speech.

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• Originally published 03/06/2017

  The Press Was the Enemy of the People in John Adams’s Era

  Jeff Biggers

  Federalists even passed a law allowing the authorities to jail journalists.

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• Originally published 02/27/2017

  Trump Embraces ‘Enemy of the People,’ a Phrase With a Fraught History

  It is difficult to know if President Trump is aware of the historic resonance of the term, a label generally associated with despotic communist governments rather than democracies.

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• Originally published 02/21/2017

  The American Press Has Served Us Well. We Need to Protect It.

  Vaughn Davis Bornet

  That new man in the White House needs to be made aware that the job he occupies is a Bully Pulpit—and not a Bullying Pulpit.

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• Originally published 02/13/2017

  Partisan at the pulpit: The Johnson amendment

  Randall Balmer

  Donald Trump’s promise to “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment, delivered at the National Prayer Breakfast last week, is a totally bad idea, one that compromises the First Amendment.

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• Originally published 02/08/2017

  Donald Trump’s Appalling Hypocrisy about Free Speech

  Robert Cohen  

  He’s no Mario Savio.

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• Originally published 12/03/2014

  Every 30 or 40 Years We See Flagrant Attacks on Free Speech. Here We Go Again.

  Lawrence Davidson

  This time it’s attacks on the critics of Israel.

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• Originally published 05/03/2014

  Alabama’s chief justice: Muhammad didn’t create us so 1st Amendment only protects Christians

  “They didn’t bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship. Let’s get real, let’s go back and learn our history. Let’s stop playing games.”

• Originally published 08/07/2013

  Student's simple stand made history in Abington v. Schempp

  He was a 16-year-old junior at Abington Senior High School, just making a statement, utterly unaware that he was about to make legal history.It was in 1956 that Ellery Schempp staged the classroom protest that yielded Abington v. Schempp, the landmark 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning mandatory Bible readings in public schools.When Schempp's homeroom teacher read aloud 10 verses from the New Testament at the start of the day, as required by Pennsylvania law, Schempp brazenly paged through a Quran he had borrowed from a friend.When a student read the Lord's Prayer over the public address system, another daily requirement, Schempp refused to stand.Those actions earned him trips to the principal and guidance counselor, and triggered years of litigation over his belief that such readings were unconstitutional....

• Originally published 04/03/2013

  State religion in NC?

  Raleigh, N.C. — A bill filed by Republican lawmakers would allow North Carolina to declare an official religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and seeks to nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide.The bill grew out of a federal lawsuit filed last month by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Rowan County Board of Commissioners. In the lawsuit, the ACLU says the board has opened 97 percent of its meetings since 2007 with explicitly Christian prayers.Overtly Christian prayers at government meetings are not rare in North Carolina. Since the Republican takeover in 2011, the state Senate chaplain has offered an explicitly Christian invocation virtually every day of session, despite the fact that some senators are not Christian....