Free speech does NOT mean without repercussions.
For example, you SHALL NOT yell "Fire" in a room full of people, and expect not to be punished.
Fromt the net:
These social functions point out that the First Amendment is about protecting the public good rather than individual freedom.
Freedom of speech in America has NEVER been absolute.
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The topic of free speech is one of the most contentious issues in a liberal society. If liberty of expression is not valued, as has often been the case in human history, there is no problem; freedom of expression is simply curtailed in favor of other competing values. Free speech only becomes a volatile issue when it is highly valued because only then do the limitations placed upon it become controversial. And the first thing to note in any sensible discussion of freedom of speech is that it will be limited because it always takes place within a context of competing values. This is what Stanley Fish means when he says that there is no such thing as free speech.
Free speech is just a term to focus our attention on a particular form of human interaction; it does not mean that speech should never be interfered with: "free speech in short, is not an independent value but a political prize" (1994,102). No society has yet existed where speech has not been interfered with to some extent. As John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty, a struggle always takes place between the competing demands of liberty and authority, and we cannot have the latter without the former:
All that makes existence valuable to anyone depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed -- by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law. (1978, 5)
The task, therefore, is not to argue for a "pure" unadulterated free speech; such a concept cannot be defended. Instead, we need to decide how much value we place on speech in relation to the worth we place on other important ideals: "speech, in short, is never a value in and of itself but is always produced within the precincts of some assumed conception of the good" (Fish, 1994, 104). In this essay, we will examine some conceptions of the good that are deemed to be legitimate limitations on speech. We will start with the harm principle and then move on to other, more encompassing arguments for limiting speech.
Before we do this, however, the reader might wish to disagree with the claims made above and warn of the dangers of the “slippery slope.” The slippery slope argument is that we should not limit free speech because once we do we will slide our way into tyranny and censorship. Such arguments assume that we can be on or off the slope. In fact, no such choice exists: we are necessarily on the slope whether we like it or not, and the task is always to decide how far up or down we choose to go, not whether we should step off altogether. It is worth noting that the slippery slope argument can be used to make the opposite point; one could argue with equal force that we should never allow any removal of government involvement with the action of individuals because once we do we are on the slippery slope to anarchy, the state of nature, and a life that Hobbes described in Leviathan as “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (1968, 186).
The second thing to note is that
we are in fact free to speak as we like. Hence, free speech differs from some other forms of freedom of action. If the government wishes to stop citizens performing certain actions, riding motor bikes for example, it can limit the freedom to do so by making sure that such vehicles are no longer available; current bikes could be destroyed and a ban can be placed on imports. Freedom of speech is a different case.
A government cannot make it impossible to say certain things. The only thing it can do is punish people after they have said, written or published. This means that we are free to speak or write in a way that we are not free to ride outlawed motorbikes. This is an important point; if we insist that legal prohibitions remove freedom then we have to hold the incoherent position that a person was unfree in the performance of an action. The government would have to remove our vocal chords for us to be unfree to speak in the same way as those who want to ride motorbikes are unfree.
A better way to think about freedom of speech is to say that the threat of a sanction makes us less free than we would be without the threat because the threat makes it more difficult and more costly to exercise our freedom. Such sanctions take two major forms. The first, and most serious, is punishment by the state, which usually consists of a financial penalty, but occasionally can stretch to imprisonment. The second threat of sanction comes from social disapprobation. People will often refrain from making statements because they fear the ridicule and moral outrage of others. For example, one could expect a fair amount of these things if one made racist comments during a public lecture at a university. Usually it is the first type that sparks the most controversy but John Stuart Mill provides a strong warning about the chilling effect of the latter form of sanction.
from
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/
