When it comes to the free speech clause of the First Amendment, I’m an absolutist, even when it comes to hate speech. I can think of few things as dangerous to a free society as censorship.

When campaign rallies become sounding boards for the vile and heinous utterances of a mob mentality, even then free speech has to be honored.

When campaign rallies start sounding like lynch mobs, with people shouting “bomb Obama,” “kill him,” “terrorist,” “traitor,” “commie faggot,” even then it is better to know what’s being thought and felt than not.

The inner demons of many people in our country have been incited and magnified by years of radio and television hate speech. And we need to know about it. It’s the only way we’ll comprehend how potentially dangerous political hate speech in America has become.

When political mobs are incited to take action, even free speech has its limits. When Rush Limbaugh agitated to get ditto heads to Denver to disrupt the Democratic National Convention this year, I’d say he was trying to incite a riot.

God forbid that some maniac takes hate talk literally and tries to kill someone in a frenzy of zealous righteousness and bigotry.

As horrifying as that possibility is, the free flow of information is indispensable. All people — even cowardly anonymous hate mailers, even racists, even misogynists, hate-baiting radio hosts and PR spin doctors selling the tripe of propaganda as fair and balanced news — they all have the right to speak their minds in America. And we have the right to listen to them, and, of course, to oppose them.

We could not oppose them if they were not free to speak and be heard.

No one who speaks their mind in the United States is immune from opposition or even verbal assault. That’s the nature of free speech. Speak your mind and others have the right to speak their minds about what you’ve said, as all columnists know only too well.

It helps, of course, if your opponents sign their real names to their diatribes; anonymity can lead to mob thinking, and can remove all responsibility and discipline from verbal exchange.

The principle of free speech doesn’t mean that all speech is equal. Some is reasoned, logical, compassionate, packed with verifiable information. Some speech is vicious, hysterical, or maliciously designed to harm rather than inform, polarize rather than analyze, inflame rather than enlighten. Some speech is childish, making parallels where none exist. Some speech is just plain hateful. And some is boring. Many people would prefer to be riled up than put to sleep.

Hate speech, however, becomes a danger that’s unprotected by the First Amendment when it could lead directly to violence, lethal circumstances or criminal behavior.

In 1919, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority in Schenck v. United States, established limits on free speech the court still follows in spirit. He wrote, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing panic…. The question … is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”

The “clear and present danger” argument was modified later in Brandenburg v. Ohio into a limitation based on speech deemed to be in danger of causing direct or “imminent” illegal acts, such as a riot or a lynching. This would fall into the category of malicious speech. But even that is not unconstitutional unless it is seen to cause immediate violence.

One can’t help but wonder what would possess Americans in a political rally in Ohio in 2008 to get so worked up that some would call for the death of their political opponent, or define him as a traitor and a terrorist for disagreeing with them. Have their worst instincts been validated and driven crazy by hate speech stopping just short of inciting imminent lawless action? Does such talk create an atmosphere that allows the wishes of the mob to become a reality?

American history is full of hate speech. The Limbaughs, O’Reillys, Hannitys, and Coulters of the present have models in the past. Take Father Charles Coughlin, the Michigan Catholic priest who is the ghostly grandfather of contemporary hate radio. He was an anti-Semite with a radio audience of nearly 4 million listeners in the 1930s, giving voice to the racist heart of a sizable segment of our population. He believed in the existence of a Jewish conspiracy, a “Judeo-Bolshevik threat.” His National Union for Social Justice sounded as totalitarian as the Nazis and Italian fascists. Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, would have approved.

Modern hate radio uses the same kind of rabble-rousing and tactics to stimulate the mob hysteria that Coughlin used. Just change the words from Judeo-Bolshevik to “liberal.”

Coughlin, was an early American proponent of public relations techniques put to the service not of selling cereal and cigarettes, but of hate, pure and simple.

It was the same kind of PR strategy that inspired Newt Gingrich in 1996 to write his “language” memo to GOPAC, a “national organization dedicated exclusively to electing Republicans,” or so it defines itself. Like any other good PR executive, Gingrich advised politicians and their helpers to start using language with strong sales power, using so called good words to describe themselves and bad words, very bad words, to describe their political opponents, Democrats and liberals.

The list of 64 bad words to be used against them included with relatively innocuous words like “bizarre,” “cheat,” “corrupt,” “disgrace,” “pathetic,” “radical,” were words like “sick,” “betray,” “traitors,” and other words to inspire the deepest loathing.

This is calculated hate speech, speech that would never be allowed to sell a commercial product, but which is allowed to sell political products and to excoriate enemies.

Perhaps it doesn’t cause immediate danger, but it is so irresponsible, so careless with potential consequences, that one day the Supreme Court might outlaw it as creating a mental environment conducive to violence. Such a decision could be so loosely written as to include all kinds of legitimate critical speech.

In using free speech to spur on the worst in us, hate talkers imperil free speech itself.