Joel Cohen and Gerald Lefcourt are old friends with whom I generally agree legally and politically. But their argument in defense of protesting in front of the homes of Supreme Court Justices is dangerous to the First Amendment and must be rejected. They argue that "morality … has nothing whatsoever to do with this," and that condemning immoral protests while defending the constitutional rights of immoral protestors to do immoral things "undercuts the right to protest." They have it exactly backwards. Their view would limit constitutionally protected speech which they find morally acceptable. But the First Amendment fully protects immoral speech as much as it does moral speech—perhaps even more so because immoral speech is more likely to be censored.

I defended the rights to Nazis to express their immoral ideas, while insisting on my right to condemn them and their ideas as immoral. If I accepted the Cohen and Lefcourt argument, I could not condemn Nazi speech as immoral without undercutting the right to protest. Condemning the content and/or acts themselves, while defending the Constitutional right to engage in condemnable speech, lies at the core of the First Amendment. I am surprised that Cohen and Lefcourt don't seem to understand this.