Can free speech go too far? A neo-Nazi group's roadside message raises questions about protecting offensive speech.

• Author: Cooper, Michael
• Position: NATIONAL

When a neo-Nazi group applied to adopt a stretch of Missouri highway in 2007, state officials felt powerless to refuse.

The state knew it had to approve the application from the National Socialist Movement on First Amendment grounds: Six years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in a similar case that Missouri had to allow the Ku Klux Klan to adopt a highway.

The decision to let the National Socialist Movement--a group that dreams of a nation where only those "of pure white blood" who are not Jewish or gay may be citizens--put up promotional signs on a state highway upset many area residents, particularly Jews. It also raised questions, as similar cases have in recent years, about the limits of the First Amendment, and how much intolerance society should accept in trying to accommodate free speech.

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"The government may not play favorites," says Charles C. Haynes of the First Amendment Center in Washington, D.C. "They can't say, 'Well, we don't like what you stand for, so you can't participate and others can.'"

The 45 words of the First Amendment lay out what the Founding Fathers regarded as the fundamental rights that Americans are entitled to: freedom of speech, religion, press, peaceful assembly, and the right to petition the government.

"Our Framers understood that the great danger of democracy was the tyranny of the majority," and that the rights of those in the minority must be protected, says Haynes. "That's why those 45 words are so important."

The courts have ruled that free speech also extends to "symbolic speech": nonverbal acts that express ideas, such as wearing an armband in protest or burning a flag.

But at the same time, the courts have concluded that some restrictions on speech are necessary. Among the things that are not protected by the First Amendment are defamation (false attacks on someone's character), child pornography, "fighting words" (statements likely to provoke a violent reaction), and speech that expresses a genuine threat to the safety of others--the proverbial "no one has the right to yell 'fire' in a crowded theater."

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But the boundaries of free speech are not always so clearly marked. Indeed, over the years the question of where free speech begins and where it ends has been the subject of intense debate, and the focus of a number of landmark legal cases.

In 1977, a neo-Nazi group applied for permission to parade through Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago...