WHEN I WAS a teenage aspiring journalist in Oklahoma, working as a layout artist for minimum wage in the smoky, ink-fumed newsroom of the Midwest City Sun, I used the paper’s headline typesetting machine to print a small banner that hung over every desk I owned between 1984 and sometime in the early aughts: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
This valiant proclamation about the importance of free speech, attributed to the French philosopher and writer Voltaire, seemed to embody everything that was essential and noble about my chosen profession, about democracy, and about our great nation.
Untested youthful idealism and bravado are easy…