The Pain of Free Speech

Perhaps the most famous limitation on the 1st Amendment is that articulated by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote that freedom of speech does not give someone the right to falsely yell “fire” in a crowded theater. But free expression certainly should extend to a Vietnamese refugee who posted Hanoi’s flag and a portrait of the late North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh at his Orange County store.

Unfortunately, the store owner, Truong Van Tran, did not appear in court last week and made his case only in interviews. That left the door open for Orange County Superior Court Judge Tam Nomoto Schumann to rule on the issue before her, the stipulations of a lease on the electronics shop. The landlord demanded that Tran remove the symbols. Schumann found that Tran had violated his lease by creating a public nuisance when hundreds in Westminster’s Little Saigon demonstrated against him over several days.

The ruling represented a setback. A decade ago, protests against Vietnamese who were considered insufficiently anti-Communist were a hallmark of Little Saigon life. Some demonstrations were violent, and one person was killed in an arson attack. But eventually the public displays of anti-Hanoi vitriol by those forced into exile by the Communist takeover of Vietnam lessened. The children of refugees assimilated. Contacts with Vietnam increased.

So it is lamentable that Tran was forced to furl even the flag of a dictatorial government that has imprisoned its own citizens for political reasons. The expression of unpopular ideas is part of democracy. Those exercising the right to demonstrate peacefully need to be reminded that others have rights that include unpopular speech.