Does the First Amendment protect someone's "right" to speak to me in public? To get in my face?

[defacto7]

57. I suppose there are as many

interpretations of the right to free speech as there are people who give a damn, but unfortunately the only interpretation that matters is that of the courts over time and ultimately the SCOTUS. The idea of free speech has been twisted into a device for uncivilized anger mismanagement rather than the premise for civilized information dissemination without government interference for governmental or political control. It's been a long journey from the need to protect the rights of citizens to have a free voice in government with the right to worship as they choose, to become what is now the right to verbal and psychological abuse that teeters on physical assault only by lack of law enforcement. Ironically, most of this abuse comes from the very ideologies that free speech was meant to protect.

The evolving courts have slowly eroded the right to free speech to its present form where it has become the right to inflict pain through speech and the right to inflict unwanted intrusion without consequence, the weakest be damned.

The courts have created a monster that destroys civil discourse in the name of harassment. In doing so we have a decline of reason in America that may just be what modern courts and corporate power miners have wanted all along: a destabilized citizenry that advances greed and sociopathic behavior opening the door back into government and corporate control.

The whole idea of free speech is completely whacked, and as far as I'm concerned has no reasonable definition. If we can't advance a cause in public without causing harm or offer it with reasonable human respect, that cause should be kept as far away as possible to protect the public. Put the impetus for advancing that cause on the speakers to do so in a civil, intelligent manner.

Anything else is just a street brawl. Might as well use clubs, although I'm sure the entertainment crowd would be agog by such an idea.