It's not the freedom to vote and choose that protects rights -- it's the status of rights AS rights, i.e., things that are inviolate and CANNOT BE VOTED ON.
I've heard it said that what really determines the strength of a democracy and its role in keeping people free is not simply whether people can vote, but what things are NOT up for a vote. (And this includes both making sure people are actually free to cast votes for their choices, as well as restricting those votes so that they cannot violate things like fundamental rights.)
This is exactly the tension between majority rule and other rights that I tried to paint. As it is, any democracy that I know about has a mechanism for updating its constitution (or whatever passes for it). In the US, that means a supermajority in congress plus 75% of the states. In the Netherlands, it requires two votes in Parliament with an election in between, the second vote needing a supermajority. Many countries require some sort of referendum. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.... Point is, the current "solution" to the tension between vote-democracy and guaranteed rights is to require a larger than majority consensus and often extra barriers to make sure that they can be voted on, but not easily.
Of course, these rights are generally not seen as absolute, and no democratic society that I know allows you to falsely accuse someone in public of being a child molester
Umm, I'm pretty sure you can get away with that in the U.S., as long as the target of the accusation is a "public figure." The important precedent is here
The keyword here is 'falsely'. The precedent is about whether a public figure should be protected from emotional distress, not from slander. From your link: "the Court found that reasonable people would not have interpreted the parody to contain factual claims". So, the defense was that there were no factual claims, and hence no false factual claims.
Basically, the statements against a public figure require "actual malice" to win a libel suit; for a private person as a target of the accusation, it requires at least gross negligence. And that's libel -- I think the standard is even higher if you were to try to claim defamation just on the ground of a verbal accusation.
IAMAL (and certainly not an American one), but afaiu in the US case truth is an absolute defense, but a false claim with malintent and harmful consequences can be prosecuted. And the US has very strong free speech rights, e.g. in the Netherlands truth is not an absolute defense with a tradeoff being made (ultimately by the judge) between the 'slandered' individual's privacy and good reputation, the 'slanderes' right to free speech, and the public's right to know. From what I understand the UK also has much stronger libel laws/precedent than the US.
The whole point was that rights are never absolute. Your free speech is limited by public safety and defamation lows. Your right to bear arms (if you're American) is limited by a whole set of laws barring you from having machine guns, jet fighters, and nuclear submarines. Your property rights are limited by expropriation laws (eminent domain) and also in a way by laws like zoning laws (which prohibit you from doing certain things with your property), etc etc.
