Thanks for sharing, interesting article. Specifically found this part provoking:
"...in one of our country’s most notable free speech cases, neo-Nazis were famously allowed to march in Skokie, Illinois, in 1978. This was despite the fact that the choice was made to clearly hurt the large population of Holocaust survivors, and Jews, who lived there.
“What Germany does is what Germany does,” says University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone. “They learned different lessons” from history. “The lesson we learned is not to trust the government to decide what speech is okay and what speech is not okay.”
“The First Amendment does not permit the government to forbid speech because ideas are thought to be offensive or odious. That's a message we have learned over our history: that we don't trust the government to make that decision.”
If we had, he says, it likely would have been used against civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights."
I've been under the impression that law enforcement officials, politicians, and other facets of the government
did take action against free speech when it came to civil rights, women's rights and LGBTQ rights. So if the First Amendment isn't universally protecting the right of ALL Americans, it begs the question for me if Germany's approach isn't the better one. Not saying it is, just something I'll ponder on.