Opinion

Balancing free speech

CAPTION.
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Free speech is a wonderful right, but it is not so wonderful when it turns into hate speech (“Free Speech Matters,” Editorial, Jan. 17).

Hate speech turns people against each other and has the potential to breed deadly violence.

Martin Luther King Jr. used free speech, not hate speech, to speak truth to power and injustice, but he did it in the spirit of love and nonviolence.

Uncivil discourse thrives in our country today because there is a market for it.

Hate rhetoric will not stop as long as there are big bucks to be made in talk radio and on cable news.

Paul Whiteley Sr.

Louisville, Ky.

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To compare a man who only preached nonviolence with those who use the rhetoric of violence (Sarah Palin’s crosshairs and Sharron Angle’s Second Amendment rights) is nonsensical and does a disservice to King.

David Hershey-Webb

Manhattan

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Before anyone is cowed into silence by warnings against “extreme” rhetoric, they should consider King’s encomium to a kind of extremism in the “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.”

Some called him an extremist for staging demonstrations and accused him of fostering tension and instigating lawlessness (in the form of civil disobedience).

King replied that a kind of tension engendered by speech is creative because it compels people to think about what is right.

He then wrote that while at first he was disturbed by the charge of extremism, upon reflection he was glad to be an extremist for love and justice.

He cites other men who were such: Amos, Paul, Jesus, Presidents Jefferson and Lincoln and his namesake, Martin Luther.

Peter Nichols

Morristown, NJ