'No' means 'no'

The Supreme Court returns to Founders' wisdom on free speech | Joel Belz

Associated Press/Photo by Lauren Victoria Burke

Time for a pop quiz. In your lifetime, who—liberals or conservatives—has brought the most cases before the Supreme Court pushing for a broader and more certain application of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech?

If you're anything like me, you've come to associate almost all such appeals with a permissive, liberal mindset. They're the ones who have said pornography's OK, that explicit sex in junior high literature courses is just fine, that flag burning's an appropriate expression of disagreement with foreign policy, that a crucifix immersed in a container of urine is permissible as a form of public art.

That's why a lot of folks were caught off guard when a conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled in January that the freedom of speech clause means just what it says: Congress can't pass laws restricting such freedom, no matter how much they dress up such laws as promoting "fairness" and "justice."