Letter: Free speech has its limits - rightfully so

Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2006 | 7:33 a.m.

In his Feb. 26 column, George Will talks about how our First Amendment free speech provisions are being whittled down, and argues against laws criminalizing Holocaust denial. I can to a considerable extent agree with what he has written, but I observe that free speech always has been, and is necessarily limited in various ways - by copyright restrictions, in incitements to violence, in libel or slander of others, for example.

Defamation is defined approximately as the making of statements as if true, without sufficient care to the truth itself. By this definition, Holocaust deniers and other revisionists libel and slander the truth, and with that defamation hurt all of us and our ability to function effectively as a society. That their denials are often the basis of incitements to violence adds to the justification for limiting this kind of speech.

Enforcement against such speech does not need to be by criminalization. Perhaps Will would feel more comfortable with a process by which those parties finding injury in such speech could sue the revisionists into oblivion. Still, even this would require enhancements of law as currently written.

Carl F. Kaun, Henderson