Is It Free Speech If I Have To Pay For It?

I've noticed that free speech isn't valued all that much these days. What I mean when I say that isn't that people don't speak freely, half the time I wish they'd shut up. Rather, it seems people have to earn the right to say certain things, usually the things that are the most true. If they have paid their dues or joined the right club or have the right gender or color skin, they can say whatever they want and nothing happens. But if someone who hasn't earned their right to say something speaks up, all hell breaks loose.

Send a guy to a feminist gathering, say a NOW convention or something, and let him try to explain that the medical exception for late-term abortions should only include medical causes that have been diagnosed by a medical professional. Let's see, assuming he makes it out alive, it will be after he is called a misogynist, a brute, and told that he is propagating sexist stereo-types of hysterical women having abortions because of some random mood swing. Long story short, it wouldn't be pretty. Send a woman in with the same message though and no one would even notice. It would be, "I completely agree" or "Oh, well, I disagree with her but I respect her and her point of view."

Another example, I had a retail job a few summers ago. An old lady came to the convenience store where I worked and, as she was filling out her American flag printed check, asked what I was doing for July Fourth. Bad idea. I told her that I planned on boycotting it and mumbled a little about being unpatriotic. She said, and oh I love hearing this, "If you don't love our country, they just leave why don't ya?" I couldn't help but tell her, "Ma'am, I can't leave, I just got back from Iraq (I had been back about seven months at this point) and it would be too soon for me to go anywhere." And what did she say next? Not a damn thing. I shut her up because I had earned my right to free speech.

But here's my problem with that. Whether I put boot to ass for Uncle Sam or not, as an American, I am guaranteed the right to free speech (granted, there are some things that should not be legal, like hate speech, yelling fire or bomb in the wrong public place, or singing anything recorded by Celine Dion). Why do I have to earn the right to my opinion or the right to express it. Didn't all of our hallowed dead, who laid down their lives at Yorktown, Saratoga, New Orleans, Gettysburg, the Belleau Wood, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Korea, Vietnam, or all of the other countless and nameless battles we have fought, didn't they earn that right for us? What good is their sacrifice? What good was the sacrifice of my brothers and sisters in arms serving in Iraqi and Afghanistan? What purpose was served in their securing of our liberty if we so cheaply discard it?

Someone once said that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. I think it was Thomas Jefferson. Eternal vigilance doesn't mean having the biggest guns and the smallest minds, it means always being aware that ensuring liberty is about as easy as grabbing a rainbow or catching one's own shadow. Securing a free society means being willing to do the hard work, and it is hard work, that it takes to ensure that we don't become so careless that we trample our rights in our zealous pursuit of our self-involved interests or perceptions of security.