Freedom for the speech you hate

Everyone has words they would be glad never to hear again: a slur, a lie about someone they love, instructions for something terrible. The question isn't whether those words do harm. It's whether anyone should have the power to stop them, knowing that someone you disagree with will one day hold that power. John Milton, the poet of Paradise Lost, made the great early case in 1644, against a law requiring books to be licensed before printing. Truth needs no censor to protect it, he argued; in open argument it beats falsehood on its own. Yet Milton drew his own line, and his tolerance did not extend to Catholics. Two centuries later John Stuart Mill went further. He argued that silencing an opinion hurts everyone, its opponents most: a true view is lost, and even a false one keeps the truth alive by forcing us to defend it. Even Mill had a limit. You may print that corn dealers starve the poor, he said, but not shout it to an angry mob outside a corn dealer's house. The most quoted line in the debate is a judge's, and it usually travels without its context. In 1919 the American justice Oliver Wendell Holmes compared dangerous speech to a false cry of fire that starts a panic in a theater, and used the comparison to uphold convictions for mailing leaflets against the draft. Months later Holmes dissented in a similar case, defending a free trade in ideas, and later courts dropped his test. Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance gets flattened too. He warned that a society that tolerates everything may be destroyed by the intolerant, but thought suppression unwise for as long as such people could be answered with argument. Where does your line fall: at words that wound, words that deceive, words that incite, or nowhere at all?