liberal groups. (On the other hand, it has encouraged con-
servative groups who fear the liberal "bias" of the media and
Hollywood). But these sentiments do not necessarily militate
for censorship. The world is surfeit with examples of groups
impatient with the progress of certain ideas and the possibility
of rapid peaceful change who sought victory not by speech
but by censoring it. History teaches that unacceptable levels
of government coercion and force lie in that direction.

But this view of progress may be Panglossian. There are no
guarantees that speech we despise will fail. The cruel dilemma
is that left unfettered, certain ideas triumph, and some per-
spectives will see them as bad ones. Speech is fluid. It moves
with an unpredictable dynamic and is inherently incompatible
with balance. Ideas are born, develop, and dominate, or lan-
guish and perish, as part of a complex interaction of culture
and dialectic that cannot be easily described or reduced to a
cookbook formula. Speech rationing would attempt some-
thing like a fix or stasis in the dialectic based upon a belief in
a "just" balance. The fix would be governed by a belief in a
"rational" and "truthful" end or goal for society. Given the
unpredictable and sometimes dangerous dynamic of speech,
the issue is then the following: Why should we permit hateful
or sexually offensive speech?

In this book we attempt to answer this question. In Chap-
ter 2 we advance a skeptical, pragmatic basis for a strong ver-
sion of the First Amendment, one that protects the most
offensive forms of speech, including hate speech. We point
out that in areas as diverse as physics, politics, and art, the
truth is ascertained by a process of debate and conversation.
The process is risky and unpredictable and, therefore, instruc-
tive. The human conversation as a path toward knowledge
can never end, because, although God is infallible and knows
the Truth, we are not and do not. Indeed, even those among

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