ABSTRACT
In 1984, Gregory Lee Johnson burned an American flag in front of the Dallas, Texas, city hall, as a means of protest against the policies of Ronald Reagan's administration. During 2005 and 2006 a group of individuals from the Westboro Baptist Church, located in Topeka, Kansas, traveled the country, shouting at grieving family members at the funerals of soldiers. In early 2010, the Oregon House of Representatives repealed a 1923 state law banning public school teachers from wearing headscarves and other religious dress in school. Clearly, these three cases all have in common their relevance to the right to free speech, or, more accurately, free expression. Most people take the right to free expression as fundamental, a social given, as it were. Philosophers often call one aspect of the relationship between expression and speech "speech acts", referring to the notion that there are various types and levels of meaning.
