The American justice system certainly has a lot of problems, but there is a big difference between a poorly implemented justice system combined with worse prisons, and slavery.
He must of meant the United States of America, not the United States of Mexico. America stood for individual freedom at its founding. It stood even more strongly for it once it got rid of slavery.
Whether the people who wrote and passed the first amendment had those specific words in mind or not, they are clearly protected when spoken or written.
Off on a tangent, one of the reasons America is so divided is too many people have tried to turn every question of policy into a constitutional issue and thus an issue for the courts.
Because the question "is this an issue that is in the government's sphere" is an important one. Many, even most issues that come up in our day-to-day life are not ones that the governments should be covering with a law.
I agree with you that the government shouldn't be regulating so much of our lives. However the idea that all such decisions should be made by the courts is problematic. A Chinese philosopher said you should treat every elder as your father. Another Chinese philosopher replied that you shouldn't, because to treat every elder as your father would mean you treat your father as every other elder.
In America we have enumerated rights because we say those rights are so special and necessary that they deserve special protection. However if we start to treat every issue as though it has the same value as an enumerated right, a right that must be litigated before it can be legislated, then start to treat every right as though it were no more important than any other.
The right to communicate anything with words is special because it is sufficient and necessary to have a debate and discuss what the laws should be and who the leaders should be. The merits of making movies of people having sex is something we can debate if we have the right to communicate anything with words; but we don't need to be able to make movies of people having sex in order to debate the merits of free speech.
Since advertising necessarily involves speech, how do you remove sexist advertising without restricting speech?
Since TV necessarily involves speech, how do you remove hard core porn from TV?
Because porn is usually not speech. Now a book like Shades of Gray is a form of porn that, under the American Constitution, clearly protected as "freedom of the press" just as the voice-overs and printed words in an advertisement are clearly protected. However movies of people having sex are neither speech nor press nor even words. They shouldn't be protected. We can use words to debate whether they should be legal (and words clearly are protected) but that's a policy issue rather than an issue of free speech.
Or you may simply recognize that men and women are biologically different both in the brain and in the rest of the body, and consider attempts to force people to believe otherwise can only succeed through an increasingly totalitarian supression of what our sense and our rational thinking tell us.
The differences between men and women are almost entirely irrelevant,
If that were true the allocation of roles to men and women in cultures throughout the world would be rather random. They aren't. This is true for both primitive societies and modern societies. Even when roles do change from culture to culture, the ways in which they are practiced by men and women are different. Female tribal leaders don't act the same way as male tribal leaders.
You need to release your dogmatic believe in the sameness of males and females. They are very different.
unless you somehow think that society should be run at the level of a zoo, with males fighting and fucking, and females breeding and childrearing.
You're against fucking, breeding, and childrearing?
I for one would like to see people behave more rationally. I would like to see women select men who are caring and kind. I would like to see guys stop treating each other, and particular the weaker among them, like shit during high school while they compete over the prettiest girls.
I would like to see a lot of things. However we can't accomplish these things by pretending human nature is something other than what it is. People have the capacity for rational thought, but they also have hormonal urges that often interfere with rational thinking. And sometimes rational thinking doesn't result in the equal results I presume you would prefer. Men can have more children than women because they don't have to wait 9 mos between having them and men incur considerably less health risks by having children. This leads to rational choices being different for men and women.
There is certainly nothing to justify paying men more than women for identical or equivalent jobs.
Do you know of anyone who is doing that? Oh, you mean the porn industry where women get paid many times what women make. I would argue that in fact they aren't equivalent jobs because women pay a greater price for participating in porn than men do.
Saying "well, that's just the way it is" is as stupid as saying 300 years ago "well, slavery is just the way it is" or 200 years ago "well, children working up chimneys is just the way it is" or 100 years ago "well, women not being able to vote is just the way it is".
There are animal elements to human nature, but they are far less important than the civilised, properly human ones. Otherwise, we'd all still be living in caves and hunting woolly fucking mammoths.
Many of the culturally based gender differences you seem to abhor are in fact the properly human behaviors that enable civilization. Men by nature want to behave differently toward women than they do toward other men, and men by nature want to take on certain roles. By denying them the opportunity to do so we give them no reason to be civilized.
And I could claim that I didn't really intend to steal that car - I was just borrowing it. People can come up with all kinds of crazy ways to try to subvert the law by manipulating the letter. You can do that with pretty much any law.
Nearly everything conveys an idea including punching someone in the face, refusing to pay taxes, refusing to rent an apartment to a nice black family, driving without a seatbelt, insider trading, killing puppies, and burning crosses.
That the fact these acts are prohibited has anything to do with free speech is a peculiar interpretation, and not at all in keeping with how the First Amendment is generally understood. Punching someone in the face isn't prohibited on the grounds of the message it communicates. It is prohibited on the grounds that the medium through which one communicates the message produces a deleterious effect unrelated to this message. Likewise I could shout "give me Liberace or give me death" outside of a concert hall, but I could not sear this message into the backside of a passerby and claim this is protected speech merely because I am using words, rather than communicating my meaning in some other way.
Many people believe porn produces a deleterious effect, I can't say whether it is related to the message because their doesn't generally seem to be a message. Now you may disagree with whether the effect is deleterious, but that's why we have free speech - so we can debate it. We can have that debate so long as we are allowed to use words to communicate and that is why it is so important to protect the right to use words.
Works of art almost never produce secondary consequences related to medium, and insofar as one does, it is prohibited based on the consequences of the medium, and not based on the message.
Exactly - which is one big reason some people want to outlaw porn (though admittedly not in the EU case). It is because of the secondary consequences to the people involved in the making of porn.
There is a Chinese proverb that says you should treat every elder as though he were your father. One philosopher responded that one should not do so, because if we treat every elder as though he were our father, it would mean treating our father as though he were just any other elder.
The same applies here. If we say that all actions are speech, and that all must be given the same protection as freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and then we observe that much of what we call speech may and should be regulated (saying "I hate you" by literally stabbing someone in the back, for example), then we have said that actual speech and actual press are no better than any other action that may be interpreted as speech.
It removes the feeling that people have some control over how they are governed
Your post demonstrates why isolating this control is not necessarily a bad idea.
You disagree with me so you're immediate reaction is to want to limit my ability to contribute to my own self-government. I'm for freedom of speech and the press, why do you want to keep me out of the debate?
Exactly, the content of the speech should be protected, not the implementation. You can say anything you want but you can't say it by showing photos or movies of naked humans.
This isn't only an issue of what people see, it is also and issue of what people are encouraged to do to create the porn. There are arguments to be made for and against it, but those arguments can be made with protected free speech. To simply shut one side of the argument down by claiming a Constitutional right that isn't in the Constitution isn't necessary when we can still have the debate using the rights that are protected.
Moreover, when did tax dollars going to causes that your religion doesn't support become suppression of your religious freedom?
In the recent assault on the Catholic Church's religious freedom, it wasn't tax dollars that were being used. Also, I'm not Catholic and I'm perfectly fine with people using contraception. But I'm not fine with forcing people to violate their religious beliefs.
I agree with you that the Supreme Court has failed to protect us from the national government. But at the same time they're failing to enforce the rights that are written, they're inventing new rights that don't exist.
>Apparantly the only purpose of the government is to regulate everything but sex. Oh, and to force people to pay for other people's sex.
You watch too much Bill O'Reily.
I don't watch any Bill O'Reilly. Given that your initial statement is so way off I don't think it is any more worth my time to read the rest of your post than it is to watch Bill O'Reilly.
I'm fine with that since nudity and dick-sucking aren't "speech". They are not words. But advertising does also contain words and at least in America where the constitution protects "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" the use of whatever words you prefer is clearly a protected right.
So again how do you prevent sexist advertising without restricting what words and sentences are used?
A problem though: If you decide porn isn't real speech, then it becomes possible for opponents of 'real' speech to argue that their opponents arguments are pornographic and should be banned. For example, the old Comstock laws in the US forbade using the US post to send any information relating to the use of contraceptives...
If you read the parent post is clearly says free speech consists of "words". Sending written instructions on the use of contraceptives through the mail is certainly protected. Pictures of people using the contraceptives aren't free speech but certainly could be protected by voters working with their legislature. The arguments people make to their legislatures and their fellow citizens are most usefully made in form of words (if the goal is rational debate rather than emotional posturing) and the words are protected free speech.
Porn isn't "freedom of speech". "Speech" implies that words are communicated. Speech is important for political communication, for discussing ideas, for rational thinking, for debating. Porn isn't.
Porn is good for a certain sort of debating.
Yes, if all you want to do is win the debate than porn can help because it can certainly distract your opponent. However if your goal is rational thought then porn makes the goal more difficult to attain.
Yes, we do communicate in a lot of ways. Sometimes we communicate by punching each other in the face or by shooting people. Not all forms of communication should be protected. But by making "word" based communication protected, we allow for all ideas to be communicated without having to allow anything and everything. If we use the idea that any and every communication must be protected than every single law becomes a first amendment issue where instead of the legislature making a rational decision we have to bring in the courts to balance speech against whatever else is being regulated.
Which is more important, my right to not be punched in the face or your right to communicate your displeasure with my clothes by punching me in the face? Which is more important, the convenience of a black family being able to eat at a restaurant or the right of the waiter to communicate their dislike of black people by refusing to serve them? Which is more important, the right to an abortion or the right of a crowd to communicate their displeasure with abortion by blocking a clinic? Which is more important, the right to life or the right to communicate the dislike of the father by killing the unborn baby? Which is more important, the pleasure of walking around unmolested by horrible odors or the right to communicate your horniness by wearing more cologne than Chanel produces in a year? Which is more important, your pleasure of avoiding horrible odors or the right to communicate displeasure with soap companies by not taking a bath for 3 years and walking around in supermarkets?
If every single action is communication - which pretty much every action is - then freedom of communication makes everything a right and thus everything is constitutionally protected in America. The only way to overcome one Constitutional provision is with another. So where is self-government if all we have left are court battles?
It is imperative that people be judged based on their individual characteristics. It is a simple undeniable fact that variation within large groups of people FAR exceeds the variation between the means of the groups. It is the idiocy of stereotyping that ignores this fact. It is appalling that people do not understand this basic truth.
Right, which is why whenever I'm in East Asia looking for someone who can speak English, I pay no more attention to any white people who may be around me and just pick someone at random. There are, after all, quite a few oriental people who speak English even in places like Japan, Taiwan, and China. And there are a few white people who don't speak any English. So whether I just want to know where the nearest McDonald's is,or whether I'm pretty sure my appendix is bursting, i don't bother using stereotypes to help me find English speakers because we all know that there is more variation within racial groups than between racial groups.
I'm sorry to hear that your son had difficulties, but it seems likely people were doing the best they could and if they didn't look for the more common case where an immigrant's child has trouble with English they would end up misdiagnosing more children whose problem really is with English and mistakenly treat the kids as though they have Asperger's.
There are certainly situations where stereotyping should be studiously avoided. And if more information can be gained to remove the need for stereotypes that is a good thing. Had the schools had the time and resources to learn about your wife's educational background perhaps they would have made a better diagnosis sooner. But often resources and time are in short supply and people have to do the best they can with what's available.
Porn really isn't "freedom of speech". "Speech" implies that words are communicated. Speech is important for political communication, for discussing ideas, for rational thinking, for debating. Porn isn't. The American Constitution was wise to protect "speech" and "the press" without including "art" or "expression" (except that "expression" was added by the triple triumphirate many years later).
We've got it completely backwards when we make porn protected "speech" while making laws to limit how much money you can spend on real speech during a political campaign.
Nearly everything conveys an idea including punching someone in the face, refusing to pay taxes, refusing to rent an apartment to a nice black family, driving without a seatbelt, insider trading, killing puppies, and burning crosses.
In America,the founders explicitly protected word media like "speech" and "the press". They knew about art and sculpture but said nothing about it.
Now I agree that banning some great works of art, including the ones you mention, would be bad, but that's a policy decision, not a question of "free speech". Just because you or I like something doesn't mean it is necessarily a right.
Off on a tangent, one of the reasons America is so divided is too many people have tried to turn every question of policy into a constitutional issue and thus an issue for the courts. When the courts step in rather than letting the legislative process play out, the debate is taken away from the people and placed in the hands of a very few. Even worse, the decision is final. This has the effect of removing the impetus for compromise that legislatures produce. It removes the feeling that people have some control over how they are governed. And it raises the stakes in every battle because the outcome is seen as permanent.
In theory that could be corrected by a free press that is largely unbiased rather than consistently cheering for one side or the other regardless of what they say or do. I realize we're nowhere near to having that but in theory it could work.
However the other alternative, where the government limits speech, can't work in either theory or practice.
Slashdot Mirror
The American justice system certainly has a lot of problems, but there is a big difference between a poorly implemented justice system combined with worse prisons, and slavery.
He must of meant the United States of America, not the United States of Mexico. America stood for individual freedom at its founding. It stood even more strongly for it once it got rid of slavery.
Whether the people who wrote and passed the first amendment had those specific words in mind or not, they are clearly protected when spoken or written.
Tau Day
That would be April 2, right?
Oh? Sorry, I thought you said "towell day".
Off on a tangent, one of the reasons America is so divided is too many people have tried to turn every question of policy into a constitutional issue and thus an issue for the courts.
Because the question "is this an issue that is in the government's sphere" is an important one. Many, even most issues that come up in our day-to-day life are not ones that the governments should be covering with a law.
I agree with you that the government shouldn't be regulating so much of our lives. However the idea that all such decisions should be made by the courts is problematic. A Chinese philosopher said you should treat every elder as your father. Another Chinese philosopher replied that you shouldn't, because to treat every elder as your father would mean you treat your father as every other elder.
In America we have enumerated rights because we say those rights are so special and necessary that they deserve special protection. However if we start to treat every issue as though it has the same value as an enumerated right, a right that must be litigated before it can be legislated, then start to treat every right as though it were no more important than any other.
The right to communicate anything with words is special because it is sufficient and necessary to have a debate and discuss what the laws should be and who the leaders should be. The merits of making movies of people having sex is something we can debate if we have the right to communicate anything with words; but we don't need to be able to make movies of people having sex in order to debate the merits of free speech.
Since advertising necessarily involves speech, how do you remove sexist advertising without restricting speech?
Since TV necessarily involves speech, how do you remove hard core porn from TV?
Because porn is usually not speech. Now a book like Shades of Gray is a form of porn that, under the American Constitution, clearly protected as "freedom of the press" just as the voice-overs and printed words in an advertisement are clearly protected. However movies of people having sex are neither speech nor press nor even words. They shouldn't be protected. We can use words to debate whether they should be legal (and words clearly are protected) but that's a policy issue rather than an issue of free speech.
Or you may simply recognize that men and women are biologically different both in the brain and in the rest of the body, and consider attempts to force people to believe otherwise can only succeed through an increasingly totalitarian supression of what our sense and our rational thinking tell us.
The differences between men and women are almost entirely irrelevant,
If that were true the allocation of roles to men and women in cultures throughout the world would be rather random. They aren't. This is true for both primitive societies and modern societies. Even when roles do change from culture to culture, the ways in which they are practiced by men and women are different. Female tribal leaders don't act the same way as male tribal leaders.
You need to release your dogmatic believe in the sameness of males and females. They are very different.
unless you somehow think that society should be run at the level of a zoo, with males fighting and fucking, and females breeding and childrearing.
You're against fucking, breeding, and childrearing?
I for one would like to see people behave more rationally. I would like to see women select men who are caring and kind. I would like to see guys stop treating each other, and particular the weaker among them, like shit during high school while they compete over the prettiest girls.
I would like to see a lot of things. However we can't accomplish these things by pretending human nature is something other than what it is. People have the capacity for rational thought, but they also have hormonal urges that often interfere with rational thinking. And sometimes rational thinking doesn't result in the equal results I presume you would prefer. Men can have more children than women because they don't have to wait 9 mos between having them and men incur considerably less health risks by having children. This leads to rational choices being different for men and women.
There is certainly nothing to justify paying men more than women for identical or equivalent jobs.
Do you know of anyone who is doing that? Oh, you mean the porn industry where women get paid many times what women make. I would argue that in fact they aren't equivalent jobs because women pay a greater price for participating in porn than men do.
Saying "well, that's just the way it is" is as stupid as saying 300 years ago "well, slavery is just the way it is" or 200 years ago "well, children working up chimneys is just the way it is" or 100 years ago "well, women not being able to vote is just the way it is".
There are animal elements to human nature, but they are far less important than the civilised, properly human ones. Otherwise, we'd all still be living in caves and hunting woolly fucking mammoths.
Many of the culturally based gender differences you seem to abhor are in fact the properly human behaviors that enable civilization. Men by nature want to behave differently toward women than they do toward other men, and men by nature want to take on certain roles. By denying them the opportunity to do so we give them no reason to be civilized.
And I could claim that I didn't really intend to steal that car - I was just borrowing it. People can come up with all kinds of crazy ways to try to subvert the law by manipulating the letter. You can do that with pretty much any law.
Nearly everything conveys an idea including punching someone in the face, refusing to pay taxes, refusing to rent an apartment to a nice black family, driving without a seatbelt, insider trading, killing puppies, and burning crosses.
That the fact these acts are prohibited has anything to do with free speech is a peculiar interpretation, and not at all in keeping with how the First Amendment is generally understood. Punching someone in the face isn't prohibited on the grounds of the message it communicates. It is prohibited on the grounds that the medium through which one communicates the message produces a deleterious effect unrelated to this message. Likewise I could shout "give me Liberace or give me death" outside of a concert hall, but I could not sear this message into the backside of a passerby and claim this is protected speech merely because I am using words, rather than communicating my meaning in some other way.
Many people believe porn produces a deleterious effect, I can't say whether it is related to the message because their doesn't generally seem to be a message. Now you may disagree with whether the effect is deleterious, but that's why we have free speech - so we can debate it. We can have that debate so long as we are allowed to use words to communicate and that is why it is so important to protect the right to use words.
Works of art almost never produce secondary consequences related to medium, and insofar as one does, it is prohibited based on the consequences of the medium, and not based on the message.
Exactly - which is one big reason some people want to outlaw porn (though admittedly not in the EU case). It is because of the secondary consequences to the people involved in the making of porn.
There is a Chinese proverb that says you should treat every elder as though he were your father. One philosopher responded that one should not do so, because if we treat every elder as though he were our father, it would mean treating our father as though he were just any other elder.
The same applies here. If we say that all actions are speech, and that all must be given the same protection as freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and then we observe that much of what we call speech may and should be regulated (saying "I hate you" by literally stabbing someone in the back, for example), then we have said that actual speech and actual press are no better than any other action that may be interpreted as speech.
It removes the feeling that people have some control over how they are governed
Your post demonstrates why isolating this control is not necessarily a bad idea.
You disagree with me so you're immediate reaction is to want to limit my ability to contribute to my own self-government. I'm for freedom of speech and the press, why do you want to keep me out of the debate?
Exactly, the content of the speech should be protected, not the implementation. You can say anything you want but you can't say it by showing photos or movies of naked humans.
This isn't only an issue of what people see, it is also and issue of what people are encouraged to do to create the porn. There are arguments to be made for and against it, but those arguments can be made with protected free speech. To simply shut one side of the argument down by claiming a Constitutional right that isn't in the Constitution isn't necessary when we can still have the debate using the rights that are protected.
Moreover, when did tax dollars going to causes that your religion doesn't support become suppression of your religious freedom?
In the recent assault on the Catholic Church's religious freedom, it wasn't tax dollars that were being used. Also, I'm not Catholic and I'm perfectly fine with people using contraception. But I'm not fine with forcing people to violate their religious beliefs.
Oh, and to force people to pay for other people's sex.
Cheaper than paying for other people's children, which you will do if you don't pay for their contraceptives. Experimental proof comes from Texas in this case. Spend 73 million on birth control or spend upwards of 200 million in welfare for the kids.
Perhaps it is cheaper in dollar terms, but not in terms of cost to freedom (and espeically in this case religious freedom).
No, but it wants to force other people to pay for your contraceptives.
Conservatives are generally for freedom of everything but sex.
Liberals are generally against freedom of anything but sex.
I agree with you that the Supreme Court has failed to protect us from the national government. But at the same time they're failing to enforce the rights that are written, they're inventing new rights that don't exist.
They still have every right they had before, only they have to exercise those rights in their individual capacity.
What about the right of assembly?
>Apparantly the only purpose of the government is to regulate everything but sex. Oh, and to force people to pay for other people's sex.
You watch too much Bill O'Reily.
I don't watch any Bill O'Reilly. Given that your initial statement is so way off I don't think it is any more worth my time to read the rest of your post than it is to watch Bill O'Reilly.
I'm fine with that since nudity and dick-sucking aren't "speech". They are not words. But advertising does also contain words and at least in America where the constitution protects "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" the use of whatever words you prefer is clearly a protected right.
So again how do you prevent sexist advertising without restricting what words and sentences are used?
A problem though: If you decide porn isn't real speech, then it becomes possible for opponents of 'real' speech to argue that their opponents arguments are pornographic and should be banned. For example, the old Comstock laws in the US forbade using the US post to send any information relating to the use of contraceptives...
If you read the parent post is clearly says free speech consists of "words". Sending written instructions on the use of contraceptives through the mail is certainly protected. Pictures of people using the contraceptives aren't free speech but certainly could be protected by voters working with their legislature. The arguments people make to their legislatures and their fellow citizens are most usefully made in form of words (if the goal is rational debate rather than emotional posturing) and the words are protected free speech.
Porn isn't "freedom of speech". "Speech" implies that words are communicated. Speech is important for political communication, for discussing ideas, for rational thinking, for debating. Porn isn't.
Porn is good for a certain sort of debating.
Yes, if all you want to do is win the debate than porn can help because it can certainly distract your opponent. However if your goal is rational thought then porn makes the goal more difficult to attain.
Yes, we do communicate in a lot of ways. Sometimes we communicate by punching each other in the face or by shooting people. Not all forms of communication should be protected. But by making "word" based communication protected, we allow for all ideas to be communicated without having to allow anything and everything. If we use the idea that any and every communication must be protected than every single law becomes a first amendment issue where instead of the legislature making a rational decision we have to bring in the courts to balance speech against whatever else is being regulated.
Which is more important, my right to not be punched in the face or your right to communicate your displeasure with my clothes by punching me in the face? Which is more important, the convenience of a black family being able to eat at a restaurant or the right of the waiter to communicate their dislike of black people by refusing to serve them? Which is more important, the right to an abortion or the right of a crowd to communicate their displeasure with abortion by blocking a clinic? Which is more important, the right to life or the right to communicate the dislike of the father by killing the unborn baby? Which is more important, the pleasure of walking around unmolested by horrible odors or the right to communicate your horniness by wearing more cologne than Chanel produces in a year? Which is more important, your pleasure of avoiding horrible odors or the right to communicate displeasure with soap companies by not taking a bath for 3 years and walking around in supermarkets?
If every single action is communication - which pretty much every action is - then freedom of communication makes everything a right and thus everything is constitutionally protected in America. The only way to overcome one Constitutional provision is with another. So where is self-government if all we have left are court battles?
It is imperative that people be judged based on their individual characteristics. It is a simple undeniable fact that variation within large groups of people FAR exceeds the variation between the means of the groups. It is the idiocy of stereotyping that ignores this fact. It is appalling that people do not understand this basic truth.
Right, which is why whenever I'm in East Asia looking for someone who can speak English, I pay no more attention to any white people who may be around me and just pick someone at random. There are, after all, quite a few oriental people who speak English even in places like Japan, Taiwan, and China. And there are a few white people who don't speak any English. So whether I just want to know where the nearest McDonald's is,or whether I'm pretty sure my appendix is bursting, i don't bother using stereotypes to help me find English speakers because we all know that there is more variation within racial groups than between racial groups.
I'm sorry to hear that your son had difficulties, but it seems likely people were doing the best they could and if they didn't look for the more common case where an immigrant's child has trouble with English they would end up misdiagnosing more children whose problem really is with English and mistakenly treat the kids as though they have Asperger's.
There are certainly situations where stereotyping should be studiously avoided. And if more information can be gained to remove the need for stereotypes that is a good thing. Had the schools had the time and resources to learn about your wife's educational background perhaps they would have made a better diagnosis sooner. But often resources and time are in short supply and people have to do the best they can with what's available.
And the government isn't for regulating sex.
Apparantly the only purpose of the government is to regulate everything but sex. Oh, and to force people to pay for other people's sex.
Porn really isn't "freedom of speech". "Speech" implies that words are communicated. Speech is important for political communication, for discussing ideas, for rational thinking, for debating. Porn isn't. The American Constitution was wise to protect "speech" and "the press" without including "art" or "expression" (except that "expression" was added by the triple triumphirate many years later).
We've got it completely backwards when we make porn protected "speech" while making laws to limit how much money you can spend on real speech during a political campaign.
Nearly everything conveys an idea including punching someone in the face, refusing to pay taxes, refusing to rent an apartment to a nice black family, driving without a seatbelt, insider trading, killing puppies, and burning crosses.
In America,the founders explicitly protected word media like "speech" and "the press". They knew about art and sculpture but said nothing about it.
Now I agree that banning some great works of art, including the ones you mention, would be bad, but that's a policy decision, not a question of "free speech". Just because you or I like something doesn't mean it is necessarily a right.
Off on a tangent, one of the reasons America is so divided is too many people have tried to turn every question of policy into a constitutional issue and thus an issue for the courts. When the courts step in rather than letting the legislative process play out, the debate is taken away from the people and placed in the hands of a very few. Even worse, the decision is final. This has the effect of removing the impetus for compromise that legislatures produce. It removes the feeling that people have some control over how they are governed. And it raises the stakes in every battle because the outcome is seen as permanent.
In theory that could be corrected by a free press that is largely unbiased rather than consistently cheering for one side or the other regardless of what they say or do. I realize we're nowhere near to having that but in theory it could work.
However the other alternative, where the government limits speech, can't work in either theory or practice.