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First Amendment rights lost on teens

By John Seigenthaler
Founder First Amendment Center

(This commentary first appeared in USA Weekend on January 30, 2005)

For most of the last decade, the news media have reported almost weekly on controversies close to the heart of First Amendment rights and values. The litany of issues has included religion and the Pledge of Allegiance in classrooms; the Ten Commandments in public buildings; and peaceful demonstration for and against war in Iraq, abortion rights and same-sex marriage. Then there are the court cases in which judges threaten journalists with jail sentences because they refuse to name their confidential sources.

In times such as these, a new Knight Foundation poll of 100,000 high school students testing their attitudes about those 45 words of the amendment is important, timely and, in some ways, disturbing.

Soon, some of those young men and women will be in uniform bearing arms in Iraq or Afghanistan, risking their lives to protect and preserve our Constitution. More than a third of those surveyed said they don't know how they feel about the First Amendment's guarantees of religious liberty, freedom of speech and the press, and rights to assemble peaceably and to petition government to correct wrongs. Another third said they take those freedoms for granted.

In the war-torn Middle East, those students-soon-to-be-soldiers will face enemy insurgents who want to shoot them, bomb them or behead them, simply because those fanatics hate our open society. They loathe our music and art. They demean our robust political debate. They despise our free press. To them, the Bill of Rights James Madison drafted in the First Congress is abhorrent. Never would they allow a civic square where every voice can be raised, without regard to gender, race, lifestyle or political party.

To read the students' poll responses is to realize with sadness that some may go off to war and risk their lives fighting for freedoms they take for granted, don't know about or, sadder still, disagree with. Teachers and school administrators who participated in the survey confirm that too many students have little access to journalism programs that might teach the value of constitutional rights of free expression.

Sometimes there are lessons to be learned outside the classroom. Just last month in Kuwait, U.S. soldier Thomas Wilson exercised his free-speech rights by asking the Defense secretary about the lack of armored vehicles in Iraq - a question Wilson had discussed with a reporter. Within days the Pentagon was responding positively to Wilson's concern for troop safety. It was a sobering civics lesson for students - and all of us: A soldier and a journalist worked together to make the war in Iraq safer for those who must fight to protect us.

Our constitutional liberties are worth fighting for and, when necessary, dying for. And for those young Americans who may find themselves on the front lines, they are also worth learning about.

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