First Amendment Overview: Part I

0:12[Music] hi I'm Leah and we're here at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia right over there's Independence Hall the place where our founders met to write the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution today we're gonna focus on the First Amendment you've heard a bill of rights you know the first ten amendments to the Constitution well the first amendment is probably the most famous one because it includes what we call the five freedoms the freedom of religion the freedom of press freedom of speech freedom of assembly and freedom of petition but what are these five freedoms really about what's the big idea behind them and why do they represent the core of American democracy to find

0:45out let's ask an authority on Constitution law Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or the press my guess one question to ask maybe the first question is why is that in the Constitution at all why did the framers put it there I think you have to go back to the history and you have to understand this was maybe a decade a little bit more than that after Americans had broken from England had declared their independence and had started the great experiment of found in a new nation and what was clearest in their minds front and center was the needs to give people the ability to do what they had just done which was to criticize the government to say why the government was acting wrongly and to say

1:41that they wanted no part of it anymore and that was the whole idea of the First Amendment was to say you have a right it's a constitutional right it's the highest kind of right that you can have you have a right to tell the government why it's no longer to be respected either when you're off fomenting a revolution or less dramatically when the government is just making bad choices choices that you want to change you have the ability to tell government officials what it is they're doing wrong the First Amendment protects the rights of freedom of thought expression and conscience the first the Constitution believed that these are natural rights that are so special they're given to you by God or by nature and

2:27are above the government so where did this idea come from in America Thomas Jefferson read the ideas of a guy named John Locke and embedded the idea of natural rights in the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence you may have heard this one before we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that's it right there an alien of all race those are natural rights the writers the Bill of Rights knew that in order to protect our rights we form governments and that's expressed in the second sentence of the Declaration to secure these rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of

3:05the governed let's ask Jeff Rosen the head of the National Constitution Center to tell us a little bit more about this when we move from the state of nature to civil society we alienate or surrender to government the power to control certain rights in order to obtain greater security and safety of the rights we've retained what's the quintessential unalienable and retained right well it's the right of conscience but what happens when government threatens the very rights that it's supposed to protect that's where the bill of rights comes in so when James Madison drafted the Bill of Rights he didn't make it up out of thin air he cut and pasted from the Revolutionary era state constitutions that

3:45were drafted beginning in 1776 so let's go check out those Revolutionary era sources to understand why it was that the framers thought that the rights of the First Amendment were natural and unalienable let's begin with the New Hampshire Constitution of 1783 because that better expresses the natural law foundation of the conscience rights than any other among the natural rights some are in their very nature unalienable because no equivalent can be given or received for them of this kind or the rights of conscience the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 gives us even more detail this is so important was written by George Mason and Madison and Jefferson had it by their sides when they wrote the Bill of

4:26Rights and the Declaration of Independence listen to this amazing which that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it can be directed only by reason and conviction not by force or violence and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience isn't that a remarkable statement of the enlightenment faith only reason and conviction not force or violence can determine our religious beliefs or lack of beliefs and then finally to complete this fascinating puzzle let's look at Madison's Memorial and remonstrance against religious assessments from 1786 where he quoted that language from the Virginia

5:05Declaration of Rights and goes on to say the religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate this right is in its nature and unalienable right it is unalienable because the opinions of men depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men that is just such a beautiful encapsulation of the Enlightenment philosophy and that's why Madison later went on to say that the rights of conscience and opinion must be equally and completely exempted from government regulation and that is why the final text of the First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law respecting the freedom of speech religion press assembly or petition so

5:56that's the rundown of the First Amendment the framers of the Constitution thought that our opinions and beliefs are the product of reason and the government cannot coerce or compel our opinions and beliefs in any way they're ours and we have the right to them even if they're unpopular the framers thought that we as individuals have the freedom to think to worship to believe and we also the freedom to express our opinions and beliefs unless those opinions are intended to and likely to cause imminent violence [Music] you