Censorship Debate

The relations between censorship and deleterious speech have always been the subject of much controversy among libertarians and collectivists alike. However, under the guise of public safety, governments often choose to censor all forms of expression that may be construed as harmful to the people. Ironically, authorities of state violate the fundamental rights of their people by choosing to edit the boundaries of freedom of expression itself. The fundamental thought that underlies the assumption governments should control freedom of expression has existed for centuries and, more often than not, has been detrimental to the advancement of their people. Nevertheless, public support for laws banning speech, writings, and art offensive to certain …show more content…
For disagreeing with the Church’s literal interpretation of the Bible, Galileo was imprisoned for life and would die under house arrest; thus one of the theories that had revolutionized our understanding of the universe as we know it was censored and banned because an authority with too much power over the people was offended. However this was centuries ago; many of us believe that we have surpassed these barbaric ideas of censorship and that we live in a country where everyone is equal and has the same opportunity to succeed as her/his neighbour. This is the mistake of a naïve and uninformed public that ignores the various acts of censorship that the governments of both Canada and the Unites States of America have allowed in recent years. People like Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden are jailed or are forced into …show more content…
The moment that a governing body begins to remove opposing opinions, no matter how they have come to exist, there is born a precedent for the censorship of the people, and then, in the words of Harry Truman, "a government...has only one way to go...down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all...and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." The problem with society today is that we believe we can have a free nation where the government controls what we may or may not say; however, that is not freedom: ironically enough, true freedom of expression only exists within a group of people when one is able to stand and yell that there is no freedom there. To counter ignorance and bigotry, we must not fight back with laws that may come to constrain our own