Making Sense of Censorship

Barbra Keshen, writing for the Concord Monitor July 2^nd, (regarding recent events in Litchfield) makes it clear that the ACLU not parents or towns are in the best position to decide what is suitable for your kids to read in school. As an attorney for the ACLU we can hardly blame her for her preferences.

Teachers are next appointed to this end; all in the name of protecting student’s exposure to a wide range of ideas and a diversity of political views (All likely ACLU approved). Parents, it seems, do not fit into her prescription for presenting what she calls the multiple realities of pluralistic society.  I don't know about you but that's not real big on my list of things I need  the school to teach my kids.  But assuming this is a necessary function of public education (as she does) parents we must assume lack the ability to fulfill this 'need'  where it must therefore be a job for a government run school to do.

The ACLU lawyer of course assumes too much and to defend her assumptions brandishes the politically polarizing buzz word censorship as if it were the little Dutch boy plugging up the free flowing expression of ideas through the dam of constitutional civil justice with his middle finger. But in this context censorship begins and ends with what the ACLU believes it is, which apparently trumps whatever parents believe is suitable for their children in the school they fund entirely with the fruits of their labors.

Most claims of censorship tend to focus on the presumption that any particular limitation violates our constitutional right to free speech. This is of course entirely the fault of the ACLU which has fought to expand the umbrella of what is meant by “free speech’ to things that have nothing whatsoever to do with protecting the right to publicly object to the acts or interests of government without fear of oppression; the kind of thinking where a picture of a man with a bull whip in his ass is necessary to prevent the advance of tyranny, or where refusing public funding through the NEA to a woman who plays with her vagina on stage would bring the downfall of democracy.

This kind of thinking seeps into the collective unconscious where it promulgates retarded notions in the minds of students and parents alike, not just about what censorship and free speech are, but who is entitled to each and under what terms.

Contrast that with these quotes from Justice Story, a Supreme Court Justice from 1811 to 1836, and an eminent constitutional scholar with personal knowledge of the true nature and civic responsibility to free speech and the first amendment.

That this amendment was intended to secure to every citizen the absolute right to speak, write, or print, whatever he might please, without any responsibility, public or private, therfor(e), is a supposition too wild to be indulged by any reasonable man.

And

There is a good deal of loose reasoning on the subject of the press, as if its inviolability were constitutionally such that, like the King of England, it could do no wrong, and is as free from every inquiry, and afforded a perfect sanctuary for every abuse; that, in short, it implied a despotic sovereignty to do every sort of wrong without the slightest accountability to private or public justice … where it might be justly affirmed that the liberty of the press was incomparable with the permanent existence of any free government.

In this case the ACLU (or at least Ms. Keshen) would appoint the Teachers in Litchfield as King of what are both instructional and appropriate for their subjects, where independent acts of responsibility and accountability by parents or any act by their appointed representatives who exist solely to exercise their public interests could be censorship.

Such is the nature of what they have done to the protections of political speech, that people would embrace such rubbish as claims of censorship in these circumstances, when similar forms of “censorship” are in fact abundant, desirable, and necessary in the civic and public theatre, and so well documented in existing law that even the ACLU has no desire to overturn them. 

Our government limits access to and the display of pornography, who may be displayed in a pornographic manner and to whom, who can see violent movies, provides warning of harsh language and sexual content in recordings for public sale, prohibits threatening or vulgar language in public, and many other forms of expression which meet many of the ACLU’s other ideas of “protected expression” as protected free speech based on terms tangential to the prohibition which Ms. Keshen now objects to in Litchfield.

So should we expect a lawsuit from the ACLU in defense of the schools right to include this material and present it to students against the objection of parents or is Ms. Keshen just blowing a perfunctory cloud of smoke for a fire they have no intention of starting?

I’d go with the latter. The bulwarks of civil order are not likely to fall on such flimsy grounds, which makes the presumption that this could ever be censorship the irrelevant musings of self contradictory trouble makers or ignorant automatons (like the Campbell High graduate who proclaimed this as censorship in the Union Leader just last week)

Let’s be clear here. Parents and guardians are free to purchase this same material with their own money, and at their discretion. They are free to allow their children to do the same based on their own ideas about what they are ready for. And the towns elected officials have not prohibited the sale or distribution of this or any other similar material within the limits of their political boundaries. But even then, barring any political component, it would be perfectly within their rights to do so always subject to further evaluation through public hearing and public elections if the majority of the town objected.

That is how representative government works. It expresses the interests of the people who elect it. And any abrogation of that right to any other entity depletes the public’s power to affect social or political change it deems necessary to sustain the scope and kind of the local civic order it desires. Free inquiry, as the ACLU defends it, is completely irrelevant in this context and until they bring suit to prove otherwise, they are simply trying to persuade you into thinking that their worldview is better than yours, and to make you feel guilty if you can’t explain why you disagree.

Comments

[Tom Humphreys]

Steve, as usual, a well articulated and reasoned story. Of course you realize this is the same ACLU who filed suit on behalf of an Oregon resident who wanted a cross on a hillside in the Mojave Desert, hundreds of miles from where he lived, taken down because it was on government and he might (heavy emphasis on the word might) drive by there someday and be offended by this overt and blatant display of religion.

Note: the cross in mention was placed there in the 1930's by former WW1 veterans who came to the Mojave seeking emotional and spiritual healing, as a tribute to their comrades who never came back.

Follwing this individual's line of reasoning, should we therefore remove all the crosses, Star of David's, etc at Arlington and other national cementaries, because they are government property?

[Ed Naile]

"That this amendment was intended to secure to every citizen the absolute right to speak, write, or print, whatever he might please, without any responsibility, public or private, therfor(e), is a supposition too wild to be indulged by any reasonable man"

"By any reasonable man" excludes the ACLU's INFANTILE DEMAND of public money for porn for youngsters.

Taxpayers in Litchfield should take appropriate action at the ballot box, school board meetings, LTE's, or anything that will drive the crazies back into the dark.