Photograph Source: Erin Scott – Public Domain

The Trump administration’s latest attack on the First Amendment has again raised questions about the meaning of the freedom of speech in the present-day United States. First, I happen to agree with Trump that Jimmy Kimmel is neither funny nor talented. A performer this bad could only have a show in a culture like ours. That said, this firing or dismissal—or whatever it is we’re watching right now—clearly came at the behest of the FCC chair Brendan Carr and is based purely on Kimmel’s Democratic Party politics and is therefore about as clear a violation of the First Amendment as you could have. It is not the kind of tricky hypothetical law professors might use to test their students on the requirements of the Constitution. It is not hard.

But I would submit that the law, even as found in the First Amendment, is the wrong object of focus and inquiry. The meaning of legal terms does not spring forth from the mind of god in some perfect form, but depends on us and what we think and believe. The meaning of something like the Constitution’s First Amendment is socially constructed through constant interpretation and contestation, always in flux, never a stable metaphysical given. The proper object of attention is our normative values and the ways they show up in our culture and way of life: are we committed to the freedom of thought and expression and do we show that we are? The Constitution and its Bill of Rights are perhaps symbols of our commitment to the freedom of speech, but they aren’t the commitment itself. When it........

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