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it … they will be. They will speak strangely, dress oddly, live quaintly, worship a deity they found in a dime store. Worse: they won’t like Bach or Henry James. Worse: they will live like gnats in annoying clouds. Worse: for us they will have no particular esteem. Worst: they will want us to be nice to them, share our rights, give them room. Worse than worst: they will deny us our desires if they can; they will blame us for their plights; they will give evidence, everywhere, of the same mean-spirited insecurities that have soiled our souls from our birth.
    When we deny to others their interior life, we deny ourselves all knowledge of it. We are unaware of what, unhindered, they would choose to do, how they presently feel, the strength of their resolve, what may in consequence ensue. The naive, the innocent and open, may allow us to read their minds and hear their hearts as though they were television news, and this may merely amuse us for a moment or endanger them for life; but at least they turned the tube on, they chose their own exposure, they told us what sort they were.
    Freedom of expression is, like that of speech, a freedom to conceal, to dupe, to put on an act; it is also the freedom to be a jerk; yet I should prefer that the bigots who now pretend to be my buddies, because they don’t want to lose their jobs or get sued, were rude to my face, and crude as a crowd, because then I should know who they really were, and what creeps were crawling up the columns of the courthouse to take from me my bill of rights.
    It is a tough life, living free, but it is a life that lets life be. It ischoice and the cost of choosing: to live where I am able, to dress as I please, to pick my spouse and collect my own companions, to take pride and pleasure in my opinions and pursuits, to wear my rue with a difference, to enjoy my own bad taste and the smoke of my cooking fires, to tell you where to go while inspecting the ticket you have, in turn, sent me. I shall make my Hail Marys, my happy hallelujahs, my bows and scrapes, to whom I wish and when I want; I shall wear my cap and gown with an arrogant swagger or with deceptive modesty; I shall practice foolishness day and night until I get it right.
    And if we are free to express ourselves, we are bound to give offense: a joke, a gesture, a point of view, a choice of words, a jeer. Some tyrannies are made of toes. And if you move you’ll step on twenty. Yet who is really hurt by boorish behavior but the boor? No, the tyranny of the one, the few, the many: each must be opposed, as must be resisted all brutal, all subtle, all soft, all comfortable, all easy and agreeable suppressions of the self. There are both murderers and mufflers among them.
    Nothing is older than this issue. No one has spoken more vigorously in the defense of free expression than the nonconformist John Milton. “The whole freedom of man consists either in spiritual or civil liberty,” he wrote. The free commonwealth should be most concerned to protect, above all things, our liberty of conscience, since, as a government, it ought to be the “most fearless, and confident of its own fair proceedings.”
    It is not the strength of convictions that must worry us, but their weakness: the doubts, the fears, the insufficiencies inside them, that make us take up the sword on their sad behalf, to shut all mouths not shouting for our side, to try to cow the slightest opposition and send it quietly to pasture. When one is confident of the truth, slurs are simply shaken off, remonstrance is calmly observed and duly noted, while one awaits the counterargument that cannot come—because the truth, before the contest began, was already a winner.
    I don’t have to like what you stand for, but I must stand for it all the same; and stand up for it, too, even if someone were to try totake away what I can’t stand about you without your leave, since we both ought to be resolved not to stand for that. We should not permit any