The First Amendment to the Constitution reads, in part, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech."

Nevertheless, in the fall of 2006, Congress passed — by unanimous consent in the Senate and by overwhelming voice in the House — and President George W. Bush signed Public Law 109-437, which abridges the freedom of speech.

It now is the responsibility of the U.S. Supreme Court, which last week heard oral arguments in a case challenging the law, to declare it unconstitutional.

Public Law 109-437 makes it a crime, punishable by both imprisonment and fines, to falsely claim that you were awarded medals or ribbons for service in the armed forces.

The heart of the dispute over the so-called Stolen Valor Act is not law but emotion. The notion that anyone falsely would claim to have been decorated is despicable, contemptible, infuriating, outrageous and other adjectives precluded by space and taste.

Yet that is precisely what Xavier Alvarez, an elected official with the Three Valleys Municipal Water District in Los Angeles County, did at a meeting in July 2007. He said he was a retired Marine with 25 years of service who had been wounded in 1987 and awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military award for valor.

None of it was true. Nor were previous statements that he had played hockey for the Detroit Red Wings, rescued the American ambassador and was wounded retrieving the American flag during the Iran hostage crisis, piloted a helicopter during the Vietnam War and was secretly married to a famous Mexican actress.

The question before the court in United States v. Alvarez is not whether Alvarez lied about receiving the Medal of Honor; he did and was exposed in short order. The question is whether it's constitutional to make it a crime to tell a lie.

Congress passed the Stolen Valor Act after no hearings and virtually no discussion. It declared, offering no substantiation, that false claims "damage the reputation and meaning of such decorations and medals."

Yet even a brief filed by veterans groups and military associations supporting the law admitted that "there is nothing that charlatans such as Xavier Alvarez can do to stain (the) honor" of men and women who receive awards for serving with honor, distinction and valor.

Nor does it ring true, as another supportive brief claimed, that the possibility of receiving medals motivates service members to act heroically. The Colorado district court that first rejected the law called that assertion "unintentionally insulting to the profound sacrifices of military personnel the Stolen Valor Act purports to honor."

The legal arguments defending the law cite past Supreme Court decisions (generally out of context) about laws that penalize false speech in the context of fraud, defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, perjury, federal investigations and the like, none of which apply to the Stolen Valor Act. During oral arguments last week, Justice Anthony Kennedy zeroed in on the risk that "the government is going to have a ministry of truth ..."

The First Amendment does not specify that only truthful speech is protected from government interference. Criminalizing merely self-aggrandizing lies would be a dangerous detour toward government-approved speech. The Supreme Court should say so.

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