Harsh words: Protected, nothing new | Opinion | presspubs.com – White Bear Press

So, you think the already harsh language in this years presidential campaign is the worst ever?

Probably not and additionally, political speech, vulgarities, mocking nicknames, claims of incompetence and criminal conduct and a host of personal attacks all are protected by the First Amendments guarantee of freedom of speech.

The high legal bar for public figures to successfully sue for defamation, combined with a historical judicial reluctance to intervene in political campaigns, allows candidates and their surrogates to sling the most vituperative verbal assaults.

And throughout our history, they have.

The first real presidential contest, in 1800, produced what many historians might rank as number one in personal attacks, as then-PresidentJohn Adamsfaced off against Vice PresidentThomas Jefferson.

From the president of Yale University, an Adams supporter, came the warning that if Jefferson won, We would see our wives and daughtersthe victims of legal prostitution. A newspaper in Connecticut declared that Jefferson would establish a nation where murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.

In response, Jeffersons advocates wrote that Adams was a liar, a would-be king, repulsive and a gross hypocrite who behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditical character.

Adamss son,John Quincy Adams, was both target and attacker in the presidential elections of 1824 and 1828 when facing Andrew Jackson, who lost to Adams in the first contest and won four years later.

American President: A Reference Resourceby the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, notes that in those contests, Adams called Jackson a corruptionist, an aristocrat and a budding tyrant in the model of Caesar or Napoleon, whose election would mean the end of the new American nation.

Adamss opponents spread the unjustified charge that the president had arranged a sexual liaison between a young American girl and the Russian tsar during Adamss time as U.S. ambassador to Russia. On the lighter side, they also published reports that Adams did not wear underwear and went barefoot to church services.

Jackson suffered through attacks in the 1828 election on his wife, Rachel, who it was said apparently with some justification by historians had not yet divorced her first husband before marrying Jackson. She died of a heart attack after Election Day but before Jacksons inauguration, and at her funeral, the president-elect blamed his campaign opponents for her death.

President Trumphas said multiple times that he wants to open up libel laws, which could affect future campaigns by weakening free speech protections resting on a landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan.It reinforced those protections when public officials (later expanded to include public figures) are involved.

JusticeWilliam Brennanwrote that the decision was rooted in a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide open and that it may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.

Whether offended by Trumps impolitic use of derogatory nicknames for his opponents, or by Saturday Night Live Trump parodies on TV, that commitment to uninhibited, robust and wide-open debate on issues and even candidate personalities is a hallmark of American democracy even if, at times, we might cringe at how its carried out.

Politicians get their say during campaigns. Government stays out of the way. And we get to respond at the ballot box.

Gene Policinski is a senior fellow for the First Amendment at the Freedom Forum, and president and chief operating officer of the Freedom Forum Institute.

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Harsh words: Protected, nothing new | Opinion | presspubs.com - White Bear Press