Several posts today, there was a lot of stuff on the web today. Main topic is censorship and political correctness. Several links to show here, first one: Lynn Sislo comments on my site.
Here's her conclusion:
Again, no one is actually preventing me from writing about religion or anything else. My freedom of expression is intact to the extent that I choose to exercise it. I would simply ask others to realize that the same is true for you also. Okay, so maybe some people would like to shut you up, but they haven't succeeded in doing so and in America or on the Internet they never will. I think maybe the real problem some people have is that there is more freedom than ever before - even for people we disagree with. Go ahead and speak your mind but respect the rights of others to tell you that you're full of it if that's what they believe.
It probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise. After all, as a conservative of fairly recent vintage, I’ve seen how easy it is for liberals, assisted by a compliant press, to cast ideological foes as moral reprobates and thus avoid engaging their ideas. Hadn’t it happened to a slew of judicial nominees, from Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to, most recently, Thomas Pickering and Priscilla Owen—as well as to a long line of conservative politicians and social critics? Such attacks, coming as they do from those who assert their passionate tolerance, succeed because they are so hard to respond to. They are like the classic below-the-belt question: “When did you stop beating your wife?” But today’s underhanded question—“When did you become a sexist or a homophobe or (worst of all) a racist?”—is even more lethal: the accusatory word cuts short any argument and puts the target on the defensive, as those whom you’d expect to stand firm for principle melt away.
I think it is poor form to stigmatize someone for using a politically incorrect word in a quotation. It was clear from the context of Mr. Stein's comments that the word was not used in a sentence that was formulated in his mind. It was just plain old political correctness, designed to intimidate him into silence, and in this case, also to intimidate his supporters. This may not be censorship in the sense of someone being arrested and imprisoned for his views, but let's put it in the context of Lynn Sislo's sentence: Someone was clearly attempting to prevent him from speaking, using the accusation of "racism" to bully him into silence, and bullying his supporters into repudiating his comments, helping to ensure that he would not be invited to speak again.
So let's consider the question: Just what is censorship anyway? Primarily, I think of it as any action by government to silence free speech, and under this standard, we are indeed a country of unmatched freedom. Let's widen the definition a bit however. Would it be censorship if a group of student activists stole newspapers from newstands that had advertisements for opposing points of view, as recently happened at several campuses? I'd call it such. I'd classify that as an act of force used to prevent the expression of an opposing point of view. What about the actions of student protestors at Concordia University when Benjamin Netanyahu spoke? I'd call this censorship, as it was another act of force intended to prevent his speech from being heard. I'd call Harry Stein's example censorship as well. So while I agree with Lynn Sislo that many people (such as leftist college professors and editors at The Nation) complain of censorship too quickly, I disagree with her in that I believe it happens more often than she realizes.
Posted by joelfuhrmann at October 30, 2002 08:44 PM