Pounding Sense Into Freedom (William F. Buckley)

uexpress.com ^ | 3/25/05 | William F. Buckley Jr.

[blitzgig]

Very much in the news are attempts, glancing and full-fledged, to trim the extravagances of the First Amendment. Sometimes freedom-mongering betrays itself, causing the observer to assume comfortably that a sober integration of free speech in the House of Rights is more or less on its way. But the fight needs pursuit. The season's headliner was Harvard President Larry Summers. What he said was that he fancied that not as many women as men get on with science and engineering, perhaps because there is a genetic indisposition there, women to science. Knoweth not the fury of liberal faculties, the man who makes judgments that are hostile to truly important orthodoxies, in this case, that there is no difference between men and women.

President Summers apologized more often than weeping willow trees over his presumption, but even this did not spare him formal censure by the faculty of Harvard, which brings to mind the sage who years ago said he'd sooner be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard.

The scene at Columbia University was slightly different. For once, rights of teachers and professors were being challenged. The complaint had gone out that Columbia was -- brace yourself -- anti-Semitic. This wasn't just one Jewish student, reacting to one animadversion on Ariel Sharon. It was, to quote a dispatch in the Jerusalem Post, a charge that faculty members in the school's Middle East classes "use their positions to promote anti-Zionist activism, discourage intellectual discourse on the Israeli-Arab conflict and vilify Israeli students. One student recounted a professor telling his class, 'The Palestinian is the new Jew, and the Jew is the new Nazi.'"

[cinnathepoet]

The myth that men and women are fully interchangeable is so ingrained now that anyone publicly expressing heresy is automatically pounced on and denigrated as a bigot. That's why some are hesitant to denounce same-sex marriage.

[spanalot]

"One student recounted a professor telling his class, 'The Palestinian is the new Jew, and the Jew is the new Nazi.'"

No surprise from Columbia here!

The Pulitzer Board that resides at this letist university still thinks its perfectly OK to keep Duranty's pulitzer where he covered up the genocide of 10 million in 1933.

[abclily]

Our freedom of speech has been strangled by the homosexual crowd - male and female homosexuals. They see no difference between the sexes, and they have been allowed to force their nearsightedness on the rest of us. It's time for regular folk to confront this idiocy and reclaim the discourse. Females are wired differently for pain. Some pain medications do not work for men as well as for women. Men are more disposed to building. How many women have designed skyscrapers, highways, bridges, or ships? Most humans know that men and women are different. Just the homosexuals think we are the same. Since homosexuals seem to be born with unnatural minds and feelings, why are we forced to accept their judgment on anything?

[NutCrackerBoy]

In the piece, the common theme is attempts to rein in free speech. Some we will agree with, some disagree. But we should have honesty and recognize what commonalities there are in "good" versus "bad" "censorship."

With Summers we see that an orthodoxy of the absurd suppressing academic speech that is very close to the blindingly obvious. With Ward Churchill, we see a failure to rein in a kook based on a sensibility to protect academic freedom. With people complaining about what's on TV (Janet Jackson's breast), we see legitimate concerns ridiculed; there clearly is an effect on kids when the public/private partition of adult subjects is breached.