The modern concept of the freedom of speech did not dawn until the Warren Court in the 1960s. In two cases, the Supreme Court ruled that there is no such thing as hate speech and the government may not do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly.
In 1969, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the court ruled that all innocuous speech — even that of a KKK leader publicly condemning Blacks and Jews — is protected and all speech is innocuous when there is time for more speech to challenge it. The court had already ruled six years earlier in Bantam Books v. Sullivan that public officials’ threats to punish publishers unless they silenced their authors were prohibited by the values underlying the First Amendment.
At the core of both of these cases and their progeny is the First Amendment principle that the government — once this meant only Congress; today it means all government — may not evaluate or act upon the content of speech; it may only neutrally regulate time, place and manner. Thus, the use of a bullhorn on a public street in a residential neighborhood to advance a political cause at 3 a.m. may be prohibited because it unreasonably disturbs sleep, not because the government hates or fears the message.
Hellbound and Down 