| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"" |
| Date: |
08 Oct 2004 09:16:51 PM |
| Object: |
Losing Liberty |
http://www.detnews.com/2003/editorial/0311/18/a10-328173.htm
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Losing Liberty: First Amendment
Rules Stifling Free Speech Damage Democracy
Government, colleges, courts erode the ability of the minority to
challenge the status quo
By The Detroit News
Americans' guaranteed freedom to speak their minds without fear of
retaliation is under attack from both the right and the left.
Colleges, courts, government agencies and the forces of political
correctness are slicing off slivers of the First Amendment's promise
of free speech.
The Patriot Act, with its expanded powers to snoop into the private
correspondences, conversations and reading habits of ordinary
Americans, has dampened public discourse and chilled political
dissent.
This is an assault on the most basic of American freedoms and
threatens to erode a fundamental tool for change in the United States
-- the ability of a committed, and often unpopular, minority to
challenge the status quo.
"One of the things that has defined the (Attorney General) John
Ashcroft administration is that it is unpatriotic to dissent or to
object to government policy," says Kary Moss, executive director of
the American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan.
"And hand in hand with that is an increased priority on secrecy in the
department itself. There are two issues -- the right to speech and the
right to know what our government is doing. They're intertwined."
While the closing of court proceedings such as deportation hearings
and terrorism trials violates due process rights of defendants, it
also impinges on free speech by limiting the public's ability to
monitor and respond to the legal system.
"How can we dissent, how can we preserve our right to speech if we
don't know what our government is doing?" asks Moss.
But it's not only the government that is stifling speech. Those who
would object to unpleasant or offensive expressions that might be
viewed by some as hurtful are also reining in the ability of Americans
to say what they want.
Activists have used a variety of tactics to accomplish their
objectives. They have exploited exceptions to the First Amendment to
silence voices counter to their ideology. And they have persuaded
universities to impose drastic speech codes on students and faculty,
turning institutions that were supposed to be bastions of free speech
into enclaves of repressed speech.
Silencing the Campuses
Long before September 11, college speech codes, designed to create a
more friendly campus environment, began eroding free speech.
And while the goal is admirable -- creating study environments that
are free of hostility -- it has the effect of treading on the
constitutional guarantees of free expression.
For example, the harassment policy of New York's Bard College forbids
conduct that "causes embarrassment, discomfort, or injury to other
individuals or the community."
In essence, the contrived right not to be offended is trumping the
expressed right to free speech, the crown jewel of the Constitution.
Courts tossed out early campus speech codes, including one at the
University of Michigan, precisely because they impinged on free
speech. The codes were revived in 1994 when the U.S. Department of
Education threatened to withdraw federal funding from universities if
they tolerated an environment that violated the Civil Rights Act's
bans on discrimination by race or sex.
That gave universities cover to restore speech limits. The Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education, a Philadelphia organization that
is dedicated to tracking and eradicating threats to campus speech,
says speech codes are the rule rather than the exception in higher
education. To protect these codes from legal challenges, campus
officials often tuck them into harassment or diversity policies.
The codes have been used to keep both conservative and liberal
speakers from campus podiums, cleanse student newspapers of
out-of-the-mainstream opinions and disband student groups that
advocate causes deemed objectionable by other students.
Each year, student newspapers nationwide report more than 20 instances
of their campus publications being stolen, often by groups that
disagree with the content.
Instead of being places where even the most obnoxious ideas are
dissected and debated, college campuses now are cloaked in
self-imposed silence.
Making Speech a Crime
Increasingly, government officials at all levels are wrongly equating
speech with criminal action.
They follow zero-tolerance trends that need to be reversed for two
reasons. They chill free speech. And they fail to distinguish between
crime and writing or speaking about crime.
In Mount Pleasant, a high school junior criticized his school's policy
on tardiness in a paper that threw in lewd references to school staff.
He was suspended for "verbally assaulting" those mentioned. But a
federal judge later ruled Michigan's verbal assault law
unconstitutionally vague. By definition, "verbal" is speech that can
claim First Amendment protection while "assault" is a physical attack
that cannot claim such protection.
Even poetry is under attack.
In Blaine, Wash., a high school student penned a poem that included
scenes of murder and a suicide. He gave it to his teacher to check for
spelling and style errors. The teacher took it home, read it, called
police and the student was expelled. As the teen-ager's attorney later
said, the boy was bounced for "writing a powerful piece of
literature."
In Ann Arbor, a University of Michigan sophomore was jailed without
bond for writing fiction about a rape-slaying. Prosecutors charged the
student, Jake Baker, for what he was thinking and writing.
Calling Baker a threat, they used a psychological analysis to say that
-- someday -- Baker might do something akin to what he had written.
That's a scenario that would be at home in George Orwell's novel
"1984' -- punish someone for what they might do.
The federal court threw out the Baker case. A sophomoric fantasy, no
matter how sick, is also free speech and should not draw an automatic
prison term.
In California, a group of authors are defending a 15-year-old San Jose
boy arrested at his home and convicted of writing a violent poem.
Charged with making criminal threats, he was detained for 90 days and
expelled from school. Last month, the student was supported by writers
including novelist J.M. Coetzee, who won this year's Nobel Prize for
literature.
After the controversy, the so-so poem was published in California
newspapers with no apparent adverse effect on society. Yet the student
was disciplined for making it available in his school.
Overall, speech should be given the benefit of the doubt. It's a
protected right, even if found objectionable by overly sensitive or
easily alarmed officials.
America doesn't work if its citizens are afraid to speak up, to
challenge the status quo, to ask hard questions.
Much of what is said will inevitably cause some to cringe, others to
cheer and still others to ball up their fists.
But there is far more damage in stifling speech that is deemed hurtful
or unpatriotic than there is in allowing it to flow into the open,
where it will either die in the light or thrive on the strength of its
reason.
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Vote for Bush. Why vote for the lesser of two evils?
No matter the candidates the superstition industry wins.
'Jesus' is a sock-puppet Christians utilize to add 'authority' to
whatever action they intend on taking. -Stoney
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