FIRST AMENDMENT ICON BURT NEUBORNE: From cross burning to funeral protests, hate speech enjoys broad protection.

The First Amendment, the justices have said, protected a Ku Klux Klan member decrying Jews and blacks in Ohio in 1969. It protected neo-Nazis seeking to march through heavily Jewish Skokie, Ill., in 1977. It protected a U.S. flag burner from Texas in 1989, three cross burners from Virginia in 2003 and homophobic funeral protesters in 2011.

Just two months ago, the high court ruled unanimously that even derogatory trademarks deserve First Amendment protection — a victory for an Asian-American rock band dubbed The Slants as well as the Washington Redskins.

You wouldn’t know it from the public condemnation that has followed the events in Charlottesville, which led to the death of a 32-year-old female counter-protester and two state troopers.

Faced with the racist and anti-Semitic speeches and symbols of the marchers, the violence that resulted and President Trump’s equivocal denunciation of “all sides,” Republican as well as Democratic officials have said the groups should not be welcomed anywhere.

Ah, but they are — by virtue of Supreme Court precedent.

“I don’t quarrel with the president’s recognition that people had a right to march,” said Burt Neuborne, a professor of civil liberties at New York University School of Law who represented Ku Klux Klan members and others as an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer. “This is a time to distinguish legal rights from moral condemnation.”

Indeed.