My Rights Ends Where Your Rights Begins

Last year, in a major metropolitan city, several women stood nude on a street corner protesting the media and fashion industries portrayal of women as too thin and unrealistic. They carried signs featuring statistics about eating disorders and images skeleton-thin celebrities. They were arrested as their lack of clothing in public deemed them obscene. They claimed they were using their bodies to drive home the point that they represented what real women actually looked like. They were upset because they believed their right to freedom of speech was being violated. This particular situation is still being debated but the fundamental question still remains; does the right to freedom of speech include that which could be considered offensive?

This is a multilayer question. Determinations must be made defining what is truly offensive. Does it matter who is speaking? Do certain organizations have special regulation or protection? Do the activities being debated have to be deemed as legal? The ethical questions could go on and on, but there is one issue that can be clearly stated, in the United States, there is not the right to FREEDOM of speech, there is the right to PROTECTED speech. Our ability to express ourselves is limited; my rights end where the next person's rights begin. I don't have the freedom/right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater.

It you take the above statement as the correct application of the law, then freedom of speech does not include public offensive language and images. The most notable example of this argument is the one played out in with the anti-abortion protests. How protected are the rights of those who choose to display signs with terms "murderer" and "killer" on them and photographs of dismembered body parts? And how do those rights compare to the rights who are forcibly exposed to them?

This country has laws to determine what is obscene or offensive. Displays of graphic violence are included in those laws. Movies are given a R or NC-17 rating to keep those images from being to shown to minors, and movies are something a ticket must be purchased to view. Yet anti-abortion protestors stand on street corners and display bloody pictures of mutilated fetuses. Personal view of abortion is not the problem here. Instead, is it the predicament of publicly exposing the same children that would be forbidden to see the adult rated movies to such graphic images in public.

We all have the rights to our views and opinions. We also should have the right to express them; however, that right can't supplant those around us which may be in direction opposition to our views. It is the manner in which we express them that comes into question. Parades, protests, sit-ins, petitions and boycotts have traditionally been used to bring visibility and change to volatile issues. Techniques that use obscene content or incite to violence are not and should not be protected. They offend the rights of not only the opposing viewpoint but often that of the neutral one as well. As a society we have lost the ability to recognize that our personal rights are not MORE important than that of the person