Argumentative Essay On Equal Citizenship

equal citizenship. For instance it would be wrong for Public office holders to speak in a language that supports racial discrimination, or tribalism.

There are many critics to democratic persuasion such as Andrew Koppelman who denies that the state has a duty to pursue it (democratic persuasion). He is skeptical about its necessity or its effectiveness. Robin West argues that democratic persuasion does not act strongly enough to protect equality. However it is the view of this paper that when the afore mentioned collision of equality and freedom of speech the state should opt for the former. For instance when confronted with hateful speech, the democratic state must pursue democratic persuasion to defend the free and equal status of minorities

According to Anderson and Pildes this is problematic in that “it violates the states fundamental identity; it implies that the state is Christian.” In this case the citizens’ rights against establishment of religion draws a parallel with the states duty not to endorse or establish a religion. The case of freedom of expression is somewhat different in that, they can seem to be “inverted”, this is in particular when rights are used to protect speech that is against the reasons for the right to free expression itself. Brettschneider offers a clear example in the case when “states protection of free speech rights for hate groups might appear to suggest that there should be no judgment about the racist content of the protected expression.” Tension is likely to rise between the implied message of speech protections and the reasons that are rightly understood to underlie those protections. It is therefore clear that a possible confusion might arise from inverted rights for the efficacious pronouncement of the reasons for rights; the state should find a workable framework to overcome this