Professor Jerry Coyne: Countering objections to free speech

Greg Lukianoff is, as most of you know, President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He’s also a lawyer and co-author, with Jon Haidt, of the excellent book The Coddling of the American Mind.   Yesterday in Quillette, Lukianoff wrote a piece that many of us may find useful, outlining how to give comebacks to flimsy arguments against free speech. The advice is especially useful now that both extreme Left and extreme Right are finding reasons to curtail speech, the former through demonizing certain opinions that go against Righthink and the latter through banning or censoring books. I think the article below is free, so have a look.