Free Speech

Article: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1619549,00.html

Recently, the spotlight has been shined on free speech. The issue has indeed receive a high level of scrunity by societies and governments across the globe, especially after last years outrage within the Muslim communities after a cartoon illustrating the Prophet Muhammed was published in a Danish newspaper. While Muslim communities protested, the cartoonist and his supporters claimed it was his right to have freedom of speech. Thus should freedom of speech be abolished in this world to prevent more conflicts in this world? Well, I think it should be the case whereby people can have a freedom of speech only to some extent, while offensive and totally groundless biased opinions be filtered out.

The problem of freedom of speech is especially prevelant in Western countries. People take the notion of freedom of speech or expression especially serious there. They greatly value their rights even when the odds are against them. Take the United States for example, whereby schools are being sued by students and their families over the infringement of their rights to express what they want. Redwood Middle School in Napa, California was recently sued by some parents over rules regarding student dress codes that prohibited the total freedom of expression. Amid claims that the rule were for safety reason, the parents still defended their child's stand and continued to pursue the case. Hence it shows that the westerners take their rights seriously, and can even become unreasonable when they feel that it has been infringed upon. This is all due to the First Amendment in the US which allows the freedom of expression in the US, empowering the average American to sue anyone who had infringed on it.

Therefore, in order to really restrict freedom of speech to non-offensive or groundless biaseness, people should be given less power. By doing so, they would then abid by the rules. Hence, moderately restricting rights is the way to go. Maybe by giving people too many rights, they might unknowingly abuse it.