Andrew Coyne: Free speech withers when we abandon judgment, proportion, open-mindedness and tolerance

Andrew Coyne’s more balanced take on recent free speech controversies:

People arbitrarily declaring issues “settled” about which there remains room for doubt, or at least for honest error, or trying to open issues that really are settled. How should we tell the difference? There are rules of thumb — whether it involves modelling highly complex phenomena decades into the future, like global warming, or whether, like evolution, it involves explanations of the existing order that have been tested and refined over 150 years. But mostly it is a matter of judgment.

Judgment, proportion, humility, open-mindedness, tolerance for human frailty: these are the soil in which free speech flourishes. Where we abandon them, it withers.

Andrew Coyne: Free speech withers when we abandon judgment, proportion, open-mindedness and tolerance | National Post.