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Three Free
Speech & Its Abuses (The Nut
from Nashua)
There
was a fellow running for state
rep up in New Hampshire; a man of
libertarian views on drug
legalization, he ran as a
Republican from Nashua and was
elected. Then it was discovered
that the newly minted lawmaker
had made some sickening
statements endorsing the murder
of policemen. Mr. Tom Alciere
endured three or four days under
the media microscope, before he
wisely chose to resign his
office.
The
widows of murdered police
officers (every citizen, in fact,
but especially these citizens)
were appalled at Alciere's
rhetoric. Indeed, his words were
sacrilege; for, as Oscar Wilde
wrote from his prison cell,
"Where Sorrow is, there is
holy ground." Of course,
there are a few officers who
bring discredit to their badges,
through corruption or through an
attitude of arrogance. But for
the most part, police officers
are rightly viewed as
self-sacrificial, endangering
themselves for the sake of
protecting the common good. The
memory of a massacre in
Colebrook, New Hampshire, in
which two state troopers were
slain, along with several other
townsfolk, served to magnify the
injurious tenor of the would-be
lawmaker's words.
But if
Alciere hadn't chosen to resign,
I suspect there's little if
anything that the saner lawmakers
could have done to oust him. As
vile as his opinions are, he
couldn't credibly be accused of
inciting a riot (unless or until
something ghastly occurred); and
despite his advocacy of anarchic
violence, he seems to have broken
no law.
Wisely
or not, our nation is extremist
in its tolerance of free speech.
Most of us wouldn't have it any
other way. Of course, when the
media draw our attention to a
particularly heinous abuse of
speech, we naturally tend to ask
ourselves how such corrosive
rhetoric can be discouraged.
Corrosive
rhetoric and advocacy of
bloodshed are not the exclusive
property of anti-cop fruitcakes.
Often, we hear equally disturbing
words in more genteel quarters.
For instance: A recent candidate
for Vice President of the United
States, Senator Joseph Lieberman
(D-Connecticut) has boasted of
having voted five times to
support the continued legality of
Partial-Birth Abortion, in which
a baby, as it is being born, gets
her neck gouged open with a
scissors, and a suction tube
inserted into the hole, so that
the brains of the little child
might be vacuumed out. To be
sure, Senator Lieberman is not
unique in his acquiescence to
this sickening sin, now exalted
to the status of a civil right.
Both senators from the Bay State,
Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, are
immoderate absolutists of
"choice," and continue
to be popular among
self-described Catholics. And
during his campaign for the
nation's highest office, former
Vice President Al Gore
diffidently admitted that he saw
no legal or moral obstacle to the
execution of a female death-row
inmate during pregnancy.
We must
ask: Is the abortion lobby's
advocacy of this kind of carnage
appreciably more civilized than
what Tom Alciere was talking
about? And if not, where is the
outrage?
As
citizens, we are suspicious of
the media's selectivity in
reporting instances of
"intolerance" and
"hate speech," and even
more suspicious of any government
attempt to curb our speech. But
this is perhaps a subject for
another day, and a fertile
subject at that. Why vilify
boorish baseball hurler John
Rocker, and shrug at the
hoop-shooting author of violent
rhymes, Allen Iverson? Why pelt
golfer Fuzzy Zoeller with rotten
tomatoes for lame jokes about
Tiger Woods, without scrutinizing
the lyrics of the Fugees, a
hip-hop group featuring Grammy
winner Lauryn Hill ("the
other day in Central Park, we got
the jogger")? Why is Pat
Buchanan labelled a fascist and
Louis Farrakhan merely
"controversial"? Why
can Spike Lee call for the
slaying of Charlton Heston, and
Alec Baldwin demand the stoning
of Congressman Henry Hyde,
without suffering weeks upon
weeks of media-fueled public
outrage? We will let the reader
draw his or her own conclusions.
*****
Section
Four:
Ashcroft & the Infallible
People
Progressivism
is not always progressive.
Progressivism is sometimes
selfish, intolerant, boorish,
unfair, mean-spirited and ugly.
Nowhere is this tendency more
clearly revealed than in the
vituperation directed against
President George W. Bush's choice
for US attorney general, former
Senator John Ashcroft
(R-Missouri).
A
practicing Christian who
occasionally quotes Scripture
(gasp! horror! how dare he!),
Sen. Ashcroft is a man so
squeaky-clean he makes Mister
Rogers look like O.J. Simpson.
But because he does not subscribe
to -- and, in fact, resists --
the wilder trends of American
liberalism, he's being burnt at
the stake by the Tolerant People.
We begin
to believe, in our more sardonic
moments, that the word
"tolerance" now means
an unquestioning belief in the
pigmentational infallibility of
all African-Americans (except
Justice Thomas and Ward
Connerly), a belief in the
orientational infallibility of
all lesbians and gays, in the
dynastic infallibility of the
Kennedy family, in the
philosophical infallibility of
abortion-on-demand advocates, and
in the divine right of
pluralities enjoyed by the
Rodham-Clintons.
As a
senator, John Ashcroft voted in
favor of elevating more than 20
black judges to positions on the
federal circuit courts. He voted
against one black judge, the
Honorable Ronnie White, a jurist
who is not without prudence and
intelligence, not without
moderation and caution, but also
someone who made a puzzling
decision, involving the
commutation of a death sentence
in the case of a particularly
violent prisoner. This decision
prompted Ashcroft and other
death-penalty advocates to oppose
Judge White's nomination to a
higher bench.
On
account of his opposition to
Judge White's advancement, John
Ashcroft is a racist. So we are
told.
And,
what's just as bad, he can't be
trusted to support "a
woman's right to choose." Oh
my.
Seems
Ashcroft is guilty of the one
mortal sin that the Infallible
People can't forgive. He believes
in a clear-cut difference between
right and wrong, a difference not
decided by plebiscite or
referendum or a Lambeth
Conference or ACT-UP or Rosie or
Oprah. Popular whimsy does not
define the parameters of
rectitude. There are transcendent
values, shared by all
non-decadent societies throughout
the centuries, and Ashcroft
believes in these values'
preservation.
We
venture to predict that John
Ashcroft will be confirmed as our
next attorney general -- unless
he was spotted roasting
marshmallows at Waco eight years
ago -- and that his service will
be an asset to our nation. As for
the effort by some of his
opponents to smear him as a
racist, it strikes this observer
as an intellectual equivalent to
the Central Park wilding:
unjustified, inexcusable,
cowardly.
****
Section
Five:
There Is No Section Five
An old
Monty Python joke, for which I
trust the editor and the reader
will forgive me. If I were to
continue with my Olympian
pronouncements on public ills and
civic mischief, I would probably
drain the indulgence and squelch
the patience of the gentlest of
gentle readers.
Thomas
Hardy believed that "if way
to the Better there be, it exacts
a full look at the Worst" --
a proverb that can be taken as a
call to reformation of self as
well as of society. We retain the
right, as citizens in a somewhat
free society, to deplore what is
deplorable; nonetheless, the dawn
of this new year and new century
finds us cautiously optimistic
and ever alert to the burgeonings
of amity, of civility, of peace.
END
©
2001, All rights
reserved. Tom DeFreitas.
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