Why Free Speech is Not a Virtue: Granting equal rights to truth and falsehood guarantees the collapse of a healthy American society.
O’Leary’s First Law declares: Nice is not a virtue. The modernist concept of “Free Speech” is no virtue either. It is a mask for indifferentism.
The Enlightenment sophists and their classical liberal descendants never gave a plugged nickel for the content of one’s character. Their chief concerns have always been the volume of the noise and whether every fool gets his turn. Acolytes of this secular cult traded the pursuit of truth for a chaotic “marketplace of ideas,” where liberty means nothing more than the freedom to be wrong out loud.
Pope Leo XIII—the uncompromising scourge of modernism, Masonry, and secular deceit—cut this fallacy to the bone. In his 1888 encyclical, Libertas, the “working man’s pope” wrote:
“Liberty is a power perfecting man, and hence should have truth and goodness for its object… if the mind assents to false opinions, and the will chooses and follows after what is wrong, neither can attain its native perfection, but both must fall from their native dignity into an abyss of corruption.”
Liberty means something far greater than the ability to do or say whatever one pleases. It demands the freedom to pursue the true and the good. Those bleating about free speech present themselves as no more than toddlers in adult bodies.
To wit: Error has no rights.
To grant equal rights to both truth and error is to elevate falsehood to the level of truth. Comes the secularist retort, “Everyone has their own truth. There is no universal truth.”
Yet, this proves patently false. There is one truth, and He lay in a tomb on this day, almost 2,000 years ago, only to rise from the dead to redeem the world.
Secularists reject this truth, worshiping instead at the altar of human reason. Yet, granting an unrestricted license to spread falsehoods contradicts reason itself. Propagating lies constitutes an abuse of liberty, never an exercise of it.
Reflect. A society that treats truth and error with equal indifference will inevitably descend into moral relativism. For centuries now, the poisoned tree of the Enlightenment has produced such rotten fruit.
But framed in the most positive light, liberals—classical or otherwise—and their progressive cousins view the state as a mere neutral referee in the marketplace of ideas, existing only to prevent direct physical harm. Thus, for a plumb-line libertarian, the precious “non-aggression principle” becomes their guiding light. Truth, beauty, and goodness are afterthoughts.
However, a traditional understanding of the state acknowledges its deeply paternal nature. But self-described anarchists reject, whole cloth, both paternalism and the existence of the state. Notwithstanding, the state’s moral obligation is to promote the Common Good, including the spiritual and moral well-being of its citizens. Domestically, this is the vocation of the paterfamilias.
The government already uses its lawful mandate to restrict the sale of physical poison and tainted food to protect public health. Its duty is also to restrict “moral poison” to protect the social fabric.
Whether the state lives up to its proper duty is another issue entirely, but a state that permits the public promotion of vice mocks its obligation to protect the people. Obscenities, blasphemies, and other poisons become contagions, and their resulting spiritual harm is infinitely worse than any economic damage.
Consider. The goal is eternal salvation, not a terrestrial paradise.
Yet modernist dogma relies on blind optimism and assumes human reason will naturally ensure that truth prevails. These utopians conveniently forget Original Sin. As fallen beings, base passions and rhetoric easily sway a human, who is hardly a rational actor in a utopian marketplace.
Furthermore, unlimited free speech allows the powerful to drown out truth, leaving simple people defenseless against sophisticated predation. Restricting harmful speech is, therefore, an act of charity, as it protects the vulnerable flock from rapacious wolves.
Still, the opponents of liberty and truth use the loaded pejorative, “censorship,” implying arbitrary, tyrannical suppression if one does not fall in line with the cult of the open mouth. On the other hand, those who reject this false religion reveal a philosophical position about the nature of society, not a demand for an authoritarian police state.
Free speech fails as a sacramental absolute. Self-expression possesses no inherent moral weight, and speech itself lacks uniform validity.
The classical liberal argument is a sterile myth. Every sane society restricts speech. Laws against fraud, libel, perjury, and state secrets prove the public square has boundaries. The debate is not whether to restrict speech, but what and why.
“Censorship!” is the rallying cry of free speech fundamentalists. But it is a purely negative term, defined entirely by what it destroys. Critiquing these indifferentists, however, aims at something positive: The Common Good.
A healthy society requires a shared moral foundation. Permitting obscenity actively harms the populace.
Look no further than Portland, Oregon. The city’s permissive attitude has birthed a third-world hellscape. Jack Callahan, speaking from the Rabble Bench, captures the absurdity:
“I’ve watched the Sapphic Sphinx turn your beloved Rose City into a petri dish for moral pathogens. They’ll scream ‘censorship’ if you want to keep filth off the library shelves, but they’re the first to call the feds if a logger dares to suggest that a spotted owl isn’t worth more than a man’s mortgage. It isn’t ‘free speech’ they want but the freedom to [micturate] on your rug and tell you it’s raining.”
Rational opposition to free speech does not seek the sadistic pleasure of silencing opponents. It seeks the protection of the social fabric—paternalistic care. A gardener pulls weeds not because he hates plants, but to ensure his garden flourishes.
Placing appropriate limits on destructive speech is a necessary act of maintenance for a thriving culture. The gardener pulling weeds is not being nice. He is being necessary.
Nice is not a virtue.
© 2026 by Brian D. O’Leary. All rights reserved.