Hecklers at Speeches

Does the First Amendment apply to hecklers? That is a question facing a group of students, administrators, and law enforcement officials at the University of California at Irvine. It springs from verbal barbs thrown last year towards Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren by a group of Muslim students while he spoke on campus. Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas is considering pressing charges against the group.

The first thing which must be said is that heckling is just plain rude. Further, if the only way to get your point across is by drowning out the other guy, then it must argued that your own point cannot be very compelling on its own merits. Yet these are not the real issue here. The real issue is whether free speech rights go that far.

They do not. Beyond the rather compelling irony involved in trying to defend freedom of speech by denying it to another, no one has the inherent right to say whatever they want whenever they want. There are times when simple courtesy demands that you sit down and shut up when someone else is talking, even or perhaps especially when you disagree with them. There are times when a genuine public safety question is at hand (the fire in a crowded theater scenario) and others where the right to free speech simply does not exist. The Constitution may well protect your right to express your opinions publicly, but I have every right to stifle that expression on my property.

The public university is not a place where that idea can be tossed aside lightly. What happens within its confines still essentially private, and as such the school has the right to censor certain activities and expressions inside its territory.

We are not arguing that the so-called Irvine 11 should face criminal penalty, as the University appears to have acted rationally in dealing with them. But we do say that true freedom of speech questions do not apply in the manner which their defenders are attempting to frame them. Freedom of Speech is simply not absolute.