Some (Maybe Muddled) Thoughts on Free Speech

This communique started out as a rant against my friends and former colleagues in the liberal commentariat. But, after thinking about it a lot – maybe too much – it has turned into something lumpier and messier. Still, it may be worth reading. I hope so. My subject is freedom of speech/expression, a hardy perennial in the garden of public discourse.

Nobody screams louder or with more indignation than liberals when it comes to attacking violators of somebody's rights. These screams duly erupted in April, after the Los Angeles Lakers' Kobe Bryant yelled an insult at a referee. This was not an ordinary insult, but what was called a homophobic slur. To the morally aware, a slur of this sort is not just a sin, but very nearly an unforgivable sin, the Biblical Sin Against the Holy Ghost. The liberal left roused itself in great howls of fury and indignation. The weeping, the wailing, the gnashing of teeth, the caterwauling, the rending of garments finally stopped, not when Bryant apologized, but after he was hit with a $100,000 fine. 

The same sort of thing happened just the other day, during Game 3 of the Eastern Conference NBA Finals. Joakim Noah of the Chicag0 Bulls uttered a similar slur, this time against a loudmouth fan, not against a referee. Noah was fined $50,000. And back in April of 2007, radio's Don Imus – whose boorish chatter and raunchy humor was part of his stock in trade and a major source of his popularity--actually lost his job after he insulted the women's basketball team of Rutgers University with a racial slur.

I am not writing in support of slurs, homophobic or otherwise, or other forms of low-life language. I also believe that, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, no one has the right to falsely shout fire in a crowded theater. I am also a fervent defender of human rights. But in all the hoopla about these slurs, why did no one mention the rights of Bryant, Noah and Imus? If freedom of speech means anything at all, it means the right to say unpleasant and even outrageous things, the freedom to be wrong. That doesn't mean repulsive speech should be ignored, far from it. It should be condemned and corrected. But when the expression of opinion is punished, it is no longer free. Indeed, that is the whole purpose of the punishment; to suppress it.

All this, I thought, was fair comment. But then I realized that it was not just the liberal left that was screaming; the chorus of dissentients was much larger and broader. A few nagging questions also popped into my head. Does Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, say, have a right to publicly scorn President Obama? If you choose to be a member of a team, don't you have an obligation to at least acquiesce in public with the team's leader? And don't professional athletes have a professional duty, not only to play their sports well, but to behave and speak with decency? These and other questions blunted the spear I intended to throw at the liberal left. But they may have left me in a muddle.

I will end on a recollection that may be apt. Many years ago, when I was growing up in Illinois, the members of the high school football team in downstate Pekin called themselves The Chinks. Even then, that seemed sort of daring. So I asked my father about it. He put down his newspaper, looked at me over the top of his glasses and said, "Son, the Chinese were producing great art, great literature and great cuisine centuries ago, back when our ancestors were scratching marks on the walls of caves. Their dignity is not so precarious as to be imperiled by what some high school football team calls itself."

Was my father wrong? I guess he was.