Do you really believe in free speech?

"If you don't believe in the right of people to say that you disagree with, you don't believe in free speech."

.. is kinda a cute, innocuous, inoffensive way to show support for free speech; but, it's kinda useless and gutless. You'd have to be living in The Kremlin to find yourself needing to stick your neck out to debate on ice cream flavors.

If you don't believe in the right of people to say things that you revile, that disgust you, that you find evil to its core, that not only challange but mock your foundational beliefs, to say things that hurt you personally, you don't believe in free speech.

Believing in free speech means believing that people should be able to urinate on a crucifix and call it art and that people should be able to draw Muhammad wearing a bomb as a hat. It means not only believing that people should be able to say that the Holocaust never happened but that it should happen. It means allowing people to deny the Armenian genocide.

That's free speech. That's what you have to defend if you're going to assert yourself as a defender of freedom. The curse that true defenders of freedom always face is that we have to defend most of our time defending people who we revile in a world wherein most people attribute libertarianism to libertinism, that in order to defend it we have to like it. I've thrown up in my mouth before philosophically defending certain speech and actions. But, freedom is worth it.

It's just that most people don't get what freedom actually is.