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As the world attempts to recover and respond to the Paris murders over the publication of cartoons deemed offensive to certain groups, media outlets deal with whether or not to reprint the offending pieces. For some of us the answer is not difficult. The cartoons are part of the story. It is unforgiveable that some “news” outlets will not show their readers the source of the controversy. More importantly, the ruse that this is done to avoid offending readership, rather than admitting they are motivated by fear, i.e. the terrorists have won, reeks of fundamental dishonesty.
One author at The Daily Beast has taken the opportunity to go further than so simplistic an opinion as mine and uses this occasion to evaluate the state of free speech in the United States. His honest appraisal raises all manner of questions about our commitment to free speech principles beyond any knee jerk response to the Paris attack. It is easy to condemn Islamist terrorists for lacking a commitment to free speech; it is harder to honestly question our own. In this context, I suggest reading Nick Gillespie’s How the PC Police Threaten Free Speech in its entirety . For those who choose not to, an excerpt follows in a bit.
As you consider the excesses of both the left and the right in shunting aside freedom of speech and freedom of expression for each sides’ pet obsessions, keep in mind the First Amendment of the Constitution, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech…” Remember also that this constitutional guarantee applies, through the Fourteenth Amendment, to the states and state bodies and all institutions that receive government funding.
Here is the excerpt from Gillespie’s piece:
Back in the 1980s and early ’90s, it tended to be the right, especially the religious right, that sought to shut down art and expression that it found distasteful, obscene, and irreverent. That Jesse Helms harped on the minimal taxpayer funding underwriting Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ barely disguised conservatives’ larger game in shutting down art they found sacrilegious or distasteful.…In 1989, when a student at Chicago’s Art Institute created an exhibit that invited the audience to step on an American flag, the Senate voted 97-0 to criminalize putting flags on the floor or ground.
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Today’s threats to free speech are more likely to come from “social justice warriors” on the left who say they are defending the feelings of those deemed to be crushed under the weight of supposedly systemic racism and sexism. The movement is most evident on college campuses. Twenty years ago, the ACLU inveighed against the rise of campus speech “codes or policies prohibiting speech that offends any group based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation.” Whatever the intention, the ACLU argued (and still does), such rules end up policing and punishing thought, which should be anathema anywhere but especially at a university. …More recently, under the guise of protecting victims of sexual assault, the federal government tied higher education funding to creating on-campus legal proceedings that stripped defendants of due process rights. The silencing of defendants’ rights under federal guidelines is so egregious that even the overwhelmingly progressive faculty of Harvard Law School called the government’s actions beyond the pale. Then there’s the move toward “trigger warnings,” mandatory announcements that reading and discussing material such as The Great Gatsby may cause post-traumatic stress disorders, and the creation of a whole new range of offensive and thus actionable speech called “micro-aggressions.”
The atmosphere on campuses has gotten repressive enough that comedian Chris Rock no longer plays colleges. Citing examples such as University of California at Berkeley students trying to bar an appearance by Bill Maher because of his anti-Muslim jokes, Rock told New York that he “stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative… Not in their political views—not like they’re voting Republican—but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody… You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”
Your thoughts?
graphic via shutterstock.com
Contributor, aka tidbits. Retired attorney in complex litigation, death penalty defense and constitutional law. Former Nat’l Board Chair: Alzheimer’s Association. Served on multiple political campaigns, including two for U.S. Senator Mark O. Hatfield (R-OR). Contributing author to three legal books and multiple legal publications.