Freedom of Speech: Enjoy It While You Can
The lads from the University of Oklahoma who sung a ditty about keeping ni**ers out of their fraternity are only the latest to discover the harsh limits on free speech, even in what they thought was private. They were bounced from school as soon a covertly taken video hit the Internet. “There is zero tolerance for this kind of threatening racist behavior,” explained university president David Boren (email him) though he has different standards for violence. A black Oklahoma football player who was caught on video last July smashing a white girl so hard he knocked her out and broke four bones in her face was only suspended from the team from a season and continued to attend class.
The year is only a few months old, but the principles of free speech have already taken a beating. In January, a “racist”billboard on Interstate 59 in Alabama lasted about as long as the Oklahoma frat boys. “Diversity means chasing down the last white person” was a little too “free,” as speech goes, and the message disappeared after the local mayor called “racially offense.”
After the January attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, mushy liberals claimed to be champions of free speech, but they weren't. “Je suis Charlie,” insisted Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, but then censored the Charlie Hebdo cartoons on Facebook in Turkey. In fact, Facebook helps a lot of countries, including India, Pakistan, Germany, Russia, and Saudi Arabia censor the Internet.
The New York Times didn't even pretend it was Charlie; it refused to publish the cartoons.USA Today went further–black columnist DeWayne Wickham [Email him] blasted Charlie Hebdo for pushing free speech “beyond the limits of the endurable.” [Wickham: ‘Charlie Hebdo’ crosses the line, January 20, 2015] CNN viewers saw someone holding a copy of the magazine, but only the masthead was in the frame—not the front-page cartoon.
Still in January, Carol Swain, a black professor at Vanderbilt Law School prompted calls for censorship when she wrote an op-ed piece saying that the Charlie Hebdo attacks proved critics of Islam were right. Farishtay Yamin, head of the school’s Muslim Student Association, led hundreds in a raucous protest. I’m sure she was entirely in earnest when she said that if Prof. Swain continued to speak out on “a campus that is so liberal and diverse and tolerant” she would have to be forcibly muzzled.
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