What the Hell Happened to the Left and Free Speech?

Camille Paglia writes:

"I speak with authority here because I was openly gay before the 'Stonewall Rebellion,' when it cost you something to be so," she said. "And I personally feel as a libertarian that people have the right to free thought and free speech. In a democratic country, people have the right to be homophobic as they have the right to support homosexuality -- as I 100 percent do. If people are basing their views against gays on the Bible, again they have a right to religious freedom there … to express yourself in a magazine in an interview -– this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades. It's the whole legacy of the free speech 1960's that have been lost by my own party."

Ann Althouse replies :

[S]ome liberals are making the predictable narrowly legalistic point that freedom of speech has only to do with rights held against the government. This is a point I've strongly objected to over the years, most obviously, in debating the liberal Bob Wright (see "When did the left turn against freedom of speech?" and "[W]hat free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News").

The real question is this (from Ace of Spades Blog:)

The real question is this

As between one of two possible worlds -- one in which freedom of thought and expression is generously and broadly encouraged not only by the state but by other powerful institutions, such as corporate employers, permitting a wide latitude in speech and respecting large zone of personal autonomy, or one in which freedom of thought and expression is sharply curtailed and discouraged by the threat of economic coercion against anyone dissenting against this week's folly -- which world would we prefer to live in?

It can be answered in one statement, those who protested in the 60's are NOW the one's who run the Establishment. They are the ones who are now in power and they don't care to be challenged.