Thank goodness we still have thinkers such as these, ones who are willing to stay engaged with the free-speech debate. The resolute advocacy of people such as Strossen and Stone — invaluable in its credibility and admirable in their courage to express it — is the nation’s best hope to veer away from the new authoritarianism now threatening our democratic system.

No one has stronger credentials. Stone may be America’s most-honored First Amendment authority, the producer of a host of award-winning books and the editor of the Oxford University Press’s “Inalienable Rights” series of works on the topic by other respected authors. Strossen, the youngest person and first woman to head the ACLU when she began her 17-year tenure as president in 1991, has led for decades across virtually the entire spectrum of liberal causes, including abortion rights, affirmative action and marijuana legalization, always from a staunch civil-liberties perspective.

Both grew up defending, as they saw it, the rights of minority groups, anti-Vietnam War protesters and others involved in causes commonly characterized as left-wing. Now, in maintaining their lifelong defense of free expression, these two liberal lions find themselves often aligned with more-conservative camps that might have once represented the opposition. And they are arguing with, occasionally being maligned by, those who fancy themselves today’s leading leftists.

Read more at The Washington Post