issues.

written mostly by MEN who talked of liberty and freedom and then went home to rape and beat their slaves.

And it also protects my right to call them a smelly pile of shitty asshole.

" but it is not OK to call Democrats that. Well, except during the primaries.

Would Huck Finn be as powerful a book without it? Would Blazing Saddles be as funny?

And no image should ever be considered an incitement to violence. The idea of that is horrifying. There is a good reason the barrier to speech inciting violence is so high. There are people who believe that abortion providers are inherently an incitement to violence. There are those who believed that a black kid possibly whistling at a white woman was reason to beat him to death. Or that a gay man hitting on them was reason to beat him to death.

Setting aside the question of right or wrong, there are people who truly believe those things. I hold their interpretation to be wrong because I believe there must be an actual and immediate threat. Some blithering idiot holding up a nazi flag in itself, isn't a physical threat. Lowering that bar means that people who have genuine beliefs that same sex marriage is a threat to others can also make the same claim.

The way to deal with issues isn't to hide them away. It's to bring them out into the light.

Anyone who flies or displays those symbols is far more than a "blithering idiot." They are DANGEROUS blithering idiots, because they are using those specific images to communicate a threat -- one of hatred and implied violence toward anyone who is not white. It's no wonder the swastika image is outlawed in Germany.

Public display (other than in a museum, or in an art/film-project context) of the Nazi and Confederate flags will nearly always cause confrontations and violence. They are toxic to a civil society. As a free-speech issue, displaying this iconography of hatred is tantamount to yelling "Fire!" in the crowded theater.

I would say that Nazi flags and the like are subject to the same social sanction that the N word is. Confederate flags, should be.

However, all of the above are still protected under the 1st Amendment, as they should be.

And I say that as someone whose European relatives were sent to the camps under the Nazis.

The problem here is most certainly NOT the 1st Amendment.