Elon Musk vs. Tim Walz: Free Speech in the Balance
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Fish take water for granted—until, that is, they are no longer in it. Then they gasp and fight for their very survival.
If you are reading this in America, you are not a fish. But there is a good chance that you are tempted to take free speech for granted. If so, a video clip from Tim Walz that recently went viral, thanks to Elon Musk, sounded an alarm: free speech is imperiled. Walz, the current Democratic nominee for vice president, said this on MSNBC in 2022: "There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy."
This quotation from Walz reminds us that there are opposing visions of free speech in America today. The first is the conservative vision, which honors the right of all people to speak according to their own conscience. The second is the leftist vision, in which you are free to speak according to the leftist conscience. When you fail to obey the Left's speech codes, liberty disappears.
It does not take a rocket scientist to see that leftist "freedom" is no freedom at all. If, for example, "hate speech" is restricted as the Left desires, the speech of Christians against sin, for example, could be labeled as hateful. Religious liberty could vanish. This is what Walz signaled in his MSNBC comments.
For this reason, Christians need to support free speech, even speech with which we disagree. Libertarian Robby Soave made this point recently, quoting Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito: "Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express 'the thought that we hate.'"
Alito is right. In broad terms, Christians support free speech. We are the people, after all, who have been set free by Christ through gospel preaching (see Galatians 5:1; Romans 10). Further, in America, we know that the right to freedom of speech has enabled such proclamation to ring out like never before in history.
But we must not sleep. As Elon Musk stated, free speech is in danger today. In the United Kingdom, citizens are being arrested for sharing memes, Ireland is seeking to outlaw "mean memes," and Australia is trying to censor posts on X. Christians should oppose these efforts.
We should not be like fish who take water for granted, only to wake up to danger when it is too late.
