The worst part about censorship is that there are college professors who are too stupid to know what it actually means, or worse, that sometimes pretend to be too stupid to know what it actually means. Censorship occurs when the government stops objectionable speech from being disseminated. It does not occur when the government refuses to actually subsidize speech that may be deemed objectionable. But sometimes professors and low-level college administrators pretend that refusal to fund government speech is censorship. They usually do this when the speech is so bad that no one else would ever subsidize it. So they adopt a false definition of censorship and pretend to believe it in an effort to attack those who would understandably oppose government support of bad speech.
A case in point is the UNCW LGBTQIA Office. They recently sponsored a showing of the film “The Passion and the Power: The Technology of the Orgasm.” You can see the trailer below. It is obviously a very serious intellectual undertaking. I’m just kidding. It is actually a profoundly idiotic documentary focusing on the history of the vibrator.
The showing of a film at UNCW documenting the history of the orgasm was not nearly as bad as it gets on a college campus. In 2005, a feminist group at UNC-Chapel Hill sponsored an orgasm awareness week and built a vibrator museum in the middle of the quad. The museum was filled with vibrators, including a wooden one from the 1920s. It may have been protected free speech. But it wasn’t exactly the peak of the intellectual season.
In reality, there is actually something less objectionable about the UNC-Chapel Hill museum in comparison with the UNCW LGBTQIA film. The former activity was financed with mandatory student activity fees, which must be distributed in a viewpoint neutral fashion. The latter was a sponsored activity on behalf of a government office that should not even exist, especially in a time of deep state budget deficit.
I understand that universities must invest in technology if they want to prepare future generations to lead a nation in a complex and competitive global market. But the kind of technology we need to invest in is scientific technology. We don’t need to invest in orgasm technology. If an administrator wants to show films about vibrators to students (which are then followed by discussions with the students about the topic of their orgasms) she needs psychotherapy. She does not need her own LGBTQIA Office.
(Note: The official UNCW LGBTQIA Office flier reads “We will be showing the film, ‘The Passion and the Power: The Technology of the Orgasm,’ followed by a group discussion on the topic.” I’m not making this up).
Taxpayers have to pay for the physical space that is the UNCW LGBTQIA Office. And we are desperately short of physical space here at UNCW. We even have special committees designed to address the issue of our lack of physical space. Yet no one seems to question the decision to pay lesbian administrators to show orgasm films and lead discussions with students about their orgasms on university property in the confines of their own government funded office. No one except me apparently.
This all demonstrates a gross failure on behalf of Chancellor Gary Miller. His administration shut down the LGBTQIA Office and merged it with the Women’s Center last year after I wrote a column proposing the merger. Then, the gay activists flipped out like a bunch of terrorists at a U.S. Embassy. So Miller’s administration wimped out and re-opened the LGBTQIA Office.
Now that they have re-opened, the LGBTQIA Office has started circulating fliers that not only promote their events but also decry censorship. Their latest says “The worst thing about censorship is ___.”
I think it is time to fill in the blank by writing Chancellor Gary Miller at chancellor@uncw.edu. Tell him the following: “The worst thing about censorship is when it is used as a weapon against the over-burdened taxpayers.” Put simply, it is the climax of intellectual dishonesty.
Occasionally, a columnist must issue an apology for something he wrote that, while seeming correct at the time, later proved to be misguided. Today, is one of those occasions where I must take the time to write a retraction concerning a column I wrote some time ago. Although it has been roughly four years since the column appeared, I am still compelled to offer an apology.
The issue concerns the use of pictures of the aftermath of abortion and whether the pictures should be displayed on college campuses, which are obviously populated by scores of women who have, in fact, suffered through the trauma of abortion. Four years ago, I took the position that the pro-life movement should not be doing that. The publication of that opinion constituted a serious error of judgment on my behalf. Accordingly, I offer an apology to my readers as well as an explanation of how I arrived at that incorrect conclusion.
Liberals have a tendency to think in terms of problems and solutions, not in terms of tradeoffs. We see this all the time. A liberal will identify a social problem. Then, he will attempt to identify a solution. The bad news for the rest of us is that the liberal “solution” usually involves government intervention, not private initiative.
The “problem” I identified four years ago came from a survey on campus censorship – one that I gave in my Introduction to Criminal Justice class every semester. I simply asked which book they would like to see banned from the library and which person or group they would like to see banned from campus. I then moved into a discussion of how the growing tendency to censor (with government backing) threatens our campus environment.
For years, the KKK and the Black Panthers vied for first place among the groups my students would most like to ban from campus. Then, in 2008 I was hit with a shocking new development: students voted “pro-lifers” as the group they most wanted to see kicked off campus. Their reason was simple: they sometimes showed pictures of aborted babies.
I saw this as a “problem.” Therefore, I wrote suggesting a “solution.” The solution was that we, as pro-lifers, should voluntarily abandon the practice of showing such pictures on campus. I did not advocate government backed censorship – the kind of advocacy we expect to hear from liberals. I just thought that voluntary abandonment of the practice would be the best “solution.” In retrospect, the suggestion was more than just naïve. It was stupid. And I am very sorry I ever wrote the column.
Living in an imperfect world among fallen people does not generally facilitate finding solutions to problems. Life is not that simple. Instead, it involves the making of decisions involving trade-offs. The decision of whether pictures of aborted babies should be displayed – even on campuses among those who have experienced abortion – is no different. So I should not have approached the issue like the liberals analyzing things within a problem/solution framework. I should have examined the trade-offs.
Put simply, the use of graphic abortion pictures on college campuses will upset women who have had abortions. They will also upset men who have financed abortions – especially those who actively pressured women into having them. But a greater number of people will be awaked to the fact that abortion involves the dismemberment of innocent human beings. Confrontation with those pictures will put the lie to the assertion that the unborn is nothing more than a clump of cells. The confrontation will draw an unmistakable moral distinction between the picking of a scab and the termination of a pregnancy. There may be negative aspects to showing the pictures. But they are far outweighed by the information they convey and the moral impulse they compel.
Put simply, we cannot enable those who would deny the American Holocaust in order to reduce emotional discomfort. That is not an acceptable trade-off. It sounds more like a final solution.
Campaign operatives masquerading as media “fact checkers.”
A President who uses the power of the Executive Branch to shutdown blogs.
Do American journalists care?
The left-leaning sensibilities of America’s dominant journalist culture are well established. But what isn’t so well established is how comfortable American journalists are with the undermining of their own craft, by a Democrat President named Barack Obama.
Had media professionals been more interested in facts back in 2008, rather than merely advancing the narrowly defined agenda of “diversity” and ushering in America’s first Black President, there may have been concern about Barack Obama and the company he keeps. Now after nearly three and a half years of “change,” it remains to be seen if the journalists among us remain committed to the agenda.
On May 26th of this year, ABC News Senior Correspondent Jake Tapper correctly noted that the Obama re-election campaign’s media “truth team” operation is “muddying the waters” of information about the President. The “truth team,” as Tapper pointed out, is obviously pushing a campaign agenda, and is anything but an objective “fact checking” service despite how they portray themselves.
Then on June 1st, USA Today reporter (and actual “fact checker’) Eugene Kiely noted that the Obama “truth team” was actually wrong about some claims made against Thomas O’Malley, an oil refinery owner and Republican Party donor. One can imagine that Kiely may have paid a professional price for daring to write such a thing, but facts are facts – Kiely called it as he saw it.
Yet American journalists may have seen this Obama “win at all costs” agenda coming, had they been willing to ask questions of the President. In 2009, for example, Cass Sunstein, an American legal scholar and Harvard Law Professor, was appointed by President Obama to head up the “White House Office Of Information and Regulatory Affairs.” His title is sufficiently broad and ambiguous, but throughout his tenure in the Administration he has wielded plenty of power. And had journalists been the least bit curious about Sunstein’s 2009 book “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done,” they may have become a bit concerned about their “freedom of speech,” and the free flow of information, generally.
You owe it to yourself to do an online search, and read about Mr. Sunstein and the ideas that he advances in his book. In particular, many of the thoughts that Mr. Sunstein expresses about the internet seem consistent with present-day behavior of both the Obama Administration, and the Obama re-election campaign.
Perhaps most disturbing is Mr. Sunstein’s vision for the future of web content, as he argues for a so-called “notice and take down” law. Under this provision, those who operate websites - - The Washington Post, radio stations, private bloggers, and perhaps even you, yourself -we would all be required “take down falsehoods upon notice” from the U.S. government.
And not only would the original content of websites be scrutinized by the government for “falsehoods,” website operators would also be held responsible for the content of “posts” created by the website’s visitors and readers. At first blush it may seem that, for a web operator to be held accountable for content generated by “posters,” is completely untenable. But that may very well be Mr. Sunstein’s goal - - to create an untenable situation for website operators - given his assertion that imposing “a ‘chilling effect’ on those who would spread destructive falsehoods can be an excellent idea..”
But who shall determine what, exactly, is “true” and “false?” Mr. Sunstein laments the supposed “lie” that emerged during the 2008 presidential race, that “Barack Obama pals around with terrorists.” Despite the fact that a friendship between Obama and known domestic terrorist William Ayers was something that both men acknowledged, Sunstein alludes to the notion that this was one of those “destructive falsehoods” of the sort that needs to be policed.
Less than a year ago on my daily radio talk show, a caller to my program observed that “there’s no way this (Mr. Sunstein’s proposals) could be legal, or constitutional..” Thoughtful Americans of all sorts will immediately view this situation through the lenses of constitutionally guaranteed rights.
But we should all realize by now that issues of “legality” don’t matter so much with the Obama Administration. Likewise, as Chief Justice John Roberts noted in the Supreme Court’s ruling over Obamacare, it is NOT the role of the court to save us from bad policies made by legislators.
Author’s Note: I’ll be speaking at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio on April 19. The event will start in Harrison Hall, room 111, at 6 p.m. The speech is called “Three Liberal Assaults on Free Speech (and Three Conservative Solutions)."Because it is about free speech in public forums, the speech is free and open to the public.
Tyranny is never more than a generation away. Those who wish to impose tyranny prey upon the ignorance of those they wish to subjugate. Knowing that it is easier to deprive people of their rights if they are unaware of their rights, academic elites often forsake their responsibilities in order to further their own political goals. In other words, they seek to preserve ignorance, rather than advance knowledge.
Against this backdrop, last spring I decided to dedicate an entire course to teaching the First Amendment. I’m writing this column to show one way it can be done and to show how it has been received by students. I hope other professors follow a similar path. Our students need to know what they risk losing if they remain indifferent to their God-given rights.
I originally intended (pun originally intended) to call my course “The First Amendment and Original Intent.” I also intended to use David Barton’s book Original Intent as a text. Additionally, I planned on covering 53 U.S. Supreme Court decisions. You can imagine how well that proposal went over. There was a predictable administrative “suggestion” that I change the title of the course. This was followed by a “suggestion” that I use a couple of texts written by avowed Marxists.
I successfully fought both the effort to change the course title and to “suggest” Marxist texts. In the wake of that success, I am left wondering whether a Marxist professor has ever had a capitalist administrator “suggest” that he teach using Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, or Thomas Sowell. These administrators are very predictable. Dripping with hypocritical condescension, they see academic freedom as a one way street.
But I prevailed – at least until a crisis emerged. An error in scheduling resulted in a request for me to cancel the First Amendment class and teach one of our senior seminars, which is required for graduation. The crux of the problem was that only one 25-student seminar was being offered - although there were fifty seniors graduating from our department. (Author’s note: I am not certain why we choose to call a class of 25 a “seminar” but that is beside the point).
The “First Amendment and Original Intent” course could not be used as a senior seminar for criminology graduates because it simply was not sufficiently crime-related. So I created a course called “The First Amendment and Crime” and did so in just a couple of months. That meant spending hours every day reading and re-reading a new set of Supreme Court cases and developing special oral and written requirements for graduating seniors.
The result has been highly satisfactory. It is not difficult to fill an entire semester calendar with courses relating the First Amendment to the issue of crime. Consider the following:
*Our first important free speech cases – Abrams, Whitney, and Gitlow (just to name a few) – began a long struggle to determine the appropriate limitations on the right to advocate illegal conduct, including violent revolution. This struggle would last for fifty years before the Court finally settled on the Brandenberg test.
*Defining obscenity has proved to be a difficult task for the Court. Between the Roth and Miller cases, the Court would battle for 16 years before deciding on one test for defining obscenity. During this struggle, Potter Stewart would famously quip that he could not define hard-core pornography but that he knows it when he sees it! The court has also dealt with zoning issues relating to adult theaters. This is all tied in with the secondary effects (crime) that often flow from the presence of adult books stores and topless bars.
*In recent years, cases like Mitchell v. Wisconsin have tested state penalty enhancement statutes that consider race bias at sentencing hearings following criminal trials. The implication of these laws for hate speech legislation cannot be lost upon even the most casual observer of Supreme jurisprudence.
In addition to teaching those crime-related First Amendment cases, I have also taken the time to teach students about Rosenberger v. Rector, Wisconsin v. Southworth, and NAACP v. Alabama – and other cases dealing directly or indirectly with student rights. Against this backdrop, I also assign the students to a semester-end project dealing with the erosion of free speech rights in America. This is where things have become very interesting.
On the first day of class, students were asked to respond to the same question, which is “Who is responsible for censorship in America and who is being censored?” This question is asked in order for them to contemplate a hypothesis for their semester project. It has produced varied hypotheses, such as the following:
*The religious right is responsible for a disproportionate amount of censorship in America. That censorship is primarily directed towards atheists.
*Atheists are the most censorious people in America. Their censorship is generally directed towards Christians.
*Public universities restrict expression to a greater degree than private universities. First Amendment violations at public universities are usually directed towards religious rather than secular speech and organizations.
*Conservative Catholics are less tolerant of free speech than politically liberal Catholics.
After students form a hypothesis in Part I of their paper, they must get down to business. In Part II, they must turn to scholarly sources in order to explain (theoretically) their proposed hypothesis. In Part III, they must examine empirical evidence in support of (or opposition to) their hypothesis.
Since many of my students have decided to study campus free speech issues, they will soon have to evaluate and critique academic studies of campus censorship. When they do, they will find that the topic has been ignored by scholars at our institutions of higher learning. Imagine that: universities rarely speak about the issue of free speech at universities. (However, they do talk about free speech problems occurring elsewhere).
I’ve gotten the ball rolling by teaching specifically about First Amendment issues. But what we need now is an entire course explaining why censorship is so much worse among academic elites than among normal Americans. We could call it “The Sociology of Censorship.” But that will never happen. The censors of sociology would never allow it.
Liberal theologian William Ellery Channing once observed, “The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated.”
War has indeed been declared. Channing’s contemporary liberal counterparts have declared a war for our culture. But while Channing presumably held to the oft-bandied supposition that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” today’s secular-progressive has no choice but to endeavor that “all opposition should be hushed.”
Liberals recognize that when arguing on the merits, they cannot prevail. Not only are their morally relative, redistributionist philosophies untenable and utopian, but they read the same polls demonstrating that reasonable people reject their ideas outright. In fact, Americans identify as conservative over liberal by a two-to-one margin. Even those who call themselves “moderate” lean conservative.
It makes sense. The “progressive” movement wars against natural law, pushes perpetually failed secular-socialist policies and places — above constitutionally safeguarded individual liberty — thickheaded tenets of postmodern political correctness. Liberal elites demand tolerance for all things perverse and find intolerable all things righteous.
And so, the final, desperate act of the left-wing, lemon-hocking charlatan is to marginalize, smear and ultimately shut down the competition. As a result, liberals obfuscate, propagandize and strive to silence all dissent. They no longer even try to hide it.
The evidence of this calculated assault on free speech is overwhelming, but the most recent and high-profile examples include carefully orchestrated campaigns by three well-funded, interconnected, George Soros-linked organizations: Media Matters for America (MMFA); the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC); and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).
After years of trying to censor the conservative voice of Rush Limbaugh, for instance, the George Soros-funded Media Matters recently pulled out all the stops to get him booted from the airwaves.
The pretext was Limbaugh’s unfortunate word choice in describing Georgetown “reproductive justice” radical Sandra Fluke’s attempt to compel the Jesuit university to violate its own Catholic doctrine. Democrats held a mock hearing in the Capitol building wherein Fluke demanded that Georgetown underwrite her admitted fornication practices and fork out free birth control. Limbaugh said this made her sound like a “sl*t” and a “prostitute.”
The hard-left Media Matters pounced, rolling out a pre-packaged campaign against Limbaugh. It has targeted radio stations with ads and continues a floundering crusade to get Limbaugh’s radio sponsors to drop him. Ironically, this has resulted in a revenue increase for Limbaugh, and his already millions-strong listening audience has grown significantly.
Another example of this Orwellian censorship crusade involves the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, an outfit that, until recent years, was viewed as a relatively credible civil rights organization. Unfortunately, the SPLC has now cashed in most of its remaining political capital, taking the same cynical path as its fellow travelers over at Media Matters. The SPLC too has become little more than a mouthpiece for left-wing extremism.
In a “too cute by half” attempt to marginalize those who observe the traditional Judeo-Christian sexual ethic, or who embrace a constitutionalist view of government, the SPLC has moved from monitoring actual hate groups like the KKK and Neo-Nazis, to slandering mainstream Christian and tea party organizations with that very same “SPLC-certified hate group” label. Indeed, in its promotional materials and on its website, the SPLC indiscriminately lumps well-respected, highly influential Christian organizations like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association together with domestic terrorist and white supremacist groups.
But the SPLC’s transparent guilt-by-false-association ploy has largely backfired. Whereas the strategy was intended to discourage media outlets from engaging these Christian groups, the scheme has, instead, had the unintended effect of significantly marginalizing the SPLC. You can only cry wolf so many times before people ignore you.
Finally, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) has picked up where the SPLC left off. This radical homosexual pressure group recently ramped up its tried-and-true practice of employing the very outrage it purports to oppose: defamation.
One of the left’s favorite pejoratives is “McCarthyism,” yet liberals employ it — as they mean it — masterfully. In an effort to strong-arm mainstream media outlets — already sympathetic to their cause — into blacklisting, once and for all, conservative and Christian professionals who oppose liberal sexual identity politics, GLAAD has issued an enemies list of 36 top pro-family leaders and luminaries (a list upon which yours truly is most honored and humbled to be included).
Engaging a scheme eerily reminiscent of the former Soviet Union, GLAAD’s euphemistically and paradoxically tagged “Commentator Accountability Project” enlists fellow progressives to dutifully report on a designated website anytime a pundit identified on the blacklist appears in media.
Because “hate is not an expert opinion,” GLAAD then takes the reports and browbeats the offending media outlet into disengaging the “inappropriate” conservative pundit.
As feeble justification for its censorship efforts, GLAAD provides a list of out-of-context, cherry-picked quotes — some accurate, some not — the organization finds offensive. This is paint-by-numbers, Saul Alinsky style: Rule 12, “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.”
In their manuscript, “After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ’90s” (1989, Doubleday/Bantam), Harvard-educated marketing experts Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen meticulously laid out GLAAD’s approach — something they called “jamming.”
“Jamming” refers to the public smearing of Christians, traditionalists or anyone else who opposes left-wing sexual identity politics. “Jam homo-hatred [i.e., the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic] by linking it to Nazi horror,” wrote Kirk and Madsen (sound familiar, SPLC?). They go on to suggest that activists should try to associate all who oppose homosexuality with images of “Klansmen demanding that gays be slaughtered,” “hysterical backwoods preachers,” “menacing punks” and “Nazi concentration camps where homosexuals were tortured and gassed.’”
“In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be portrayed as victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined by reflex to adopt the role of protector,” they wrote. “The purpose of victim imagery is to make straights feel very uncomfortable.”
George Orwell famously said: “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Today, conservative truth tellers are revolutionaries, fighting a guerilla war against an elitist establishment that blankets free speech with bunker-buster bombs.
Their motives are disgraceful, their tactics are cowardly and their actions are un-American. But these things rank high among the progressive “book of virtues.”
Paraphrasing Voltaire, British author Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
It’s little wonder that today’s progressives reject this noble sentiment. The success of the left-wing socio-political agenda relies upon deliberate suppression of the reality-based conservative alternative.
