The legendary Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said the most important element of the Constitution “is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
The other day, a federal judge decided to test our attachment to that principle. He ruled that the government had violated the free-speech rights of tobacco companies. Talk about hated: Their reputation puts them somewhere above Adolf Hitler but below Al Capone.
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