Free Speech in a Nation Conceived in Liberty

Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a Massachusetts law requiring a 35-foot buffer between abortion protesters and those entering an abortion clinic violated the First Amendment right of freedom of speech. Time Magazine reported:

The court objected to the notion of buffer zones in part because such broad perimeters “burden more speech than necessary” by excluding “petitioners” (“not just protesters”) from public sidewalks, streets, and other public thoroughfares, “places that have traditionally been open for speech ac­tivities and that the Court has accordingly labeled ‘traditional public fora.’”
Buffers zones deprive petitioners “of their two primary methods of com­municating with arriving patients: close, personal conversations and distribution of literature. Those forms of expression have historically been closely associated with the transmission of ideas,” the court wrote.

But the nation which enjoys a formal right of freedom of speech was also "conceived in liberty," and liberty means freedom from coercion if it means anything at all.

The Court slighted the unalienable right of those seeking a particular form of lawful medical care to do so without harassment. Dahlia Lithwick:

Right now, the commentary is pretty predictably split between those who believe that the rights of “peaceful sidewalk counselors” were vindicated, and those who believe those counselors are actually pro-life bullies. The court opts for the gentle counseling characterization, without acknowledging that it was the extreme conduct of the latter group that led to passage of the law, and that, realistically, in the absence of the buffer zone, both types of protesters will be greatly emboldened. I guess from here on in, you won’t know whether you are being intimidated or “gently counseled” until after it’s happened. (Emphasis added)

I have another objection to the way the Court thinks on this issue. Freedom of speech is the right to get the message out. To publish it. It does not include the right to make somebody listen. There's a guy who stands on a corner downtown proclaiming that the city police are communists. I avoid him. It's a free country.

Speech works by the substantiveness of its evidence and the cogency of its argument. Liberty works by the right to be left alone unless one is breaking the law. As On Liberty argues (about page 3), liberty is not only political freedom, it is freedom from "social tyranny.": 

Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

Those who oppose abortion have gotten their message out in every conceivable way and made every argument available to their case over the decades since abortion ceased to be illegal.

It is appalling that the Court thinks they also have the right to get up in the face of people who already bear the burden of a painful decision.