A Free Speech Surge

Kathy Shaidle at Five Feet of Fury has a good post on style. No, not the amazingly wonderful fantubulous bare arms of Michelle Obama – as if no other First Ladies had exposed skin above the elbow before – but the offense of forcefully expressed opinions.

Mark Steyn wonders if “there is not merely a right but an obligation to “offend the easily offended.” Yes, if we wish to carry on as a free society, we do have that obligation to offend the perpetually, sometimes professionally offended crowd.

Patterico and Jeff Goldstein have had a lengthy, sometimes acrimonious, debate on whether we should tailor our words in such a way that are less offensive and to ensure they can’t be unfairly used against us – an impossibility in this new dowdifying, gotcha generation. Reasonable people tailor their words to fit the audience. Reasonable people attempt to be specific and clear. Reasonable people attempt to learn the meaning of the speaker instead of substituting their own emotional reactions for discernment.

The trouble is, in this post-modern society most people are not reasonable. They gladly sacrifice objective truth in favor of the “larger truth” of their preferred narrative. What’s true for us isn’t necessarily true for them.  For example, the fact that the Republican GOP/President Clinton’s welfare reforms lifted more black children out of poverty than all other social welfare programs combined doesn’t stand up to the “fact” that cutting back on welfare is racist and mean!!  When Obama and the Democratic Congress rolled back those reforms, thereby guaranteeing more poverty and more crime, very few people objected.

The attacks on free speech are subtle and pervasive, often couched in the “right” not to be offended.  We need to push back in every possible way, because when these anti-free speechers scream like a goth in the sun about how offended they are and how we MUST be made to SHUT UP and stop hurting their precious wittle feewings (i.e. Pelosi’s “hate radio”), they expose themselves as anti-free speech.  They make people see the logical conclusion of government-enforced political correctness in a way that conservatives could shout from the rooftops 24/7 and still not be believed.  But seeing is believing.

Once people can get out of the rhetorical cocoon in which they’re trapped, maybe they can eventually be persuaded.  This openly leftist movie defended the right of people to express offensive, opposing views.  “Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms!  Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free,” the liberal president commands.  (At least he’s going to go “door to door to convince people” before he “gets the guns,” unlike the reality of leftist attempts to legislate them out of legal existence.  That’s working out real well in the UK, where they’re now banning knives and big sticks, too.)

I wish that people really believed that viewpoint and applied it to ALL opposing views, but most of the time in practice, “tolerance” is extended to a precious few who have the “correct” views.  This is more often seen in Canada and the UK, but never doubt these views and policies are coming to America.  An Arizona photographer was fined by a human rights tribunal (yes, some communities here have them) for refusing to photograph a same sex commitment ceremony.  That’s beyond free speech.  She was obligated to either do something she didn’t want to do or pay up.

Things are bad enough internally on the political front of the West in terms of post-modernism and the socialist trend.  But more importantly, this ridiculous cocoon also means that we aren’t pushing back against radical Islam, which is actively malevolent and imperialistic.

Most of the rhetoric the left used against George Bush’s administration can be fairly applied to the world-wide Islamic movement.  It is religiously fundamentalist, oppressive, deceptive, objectively evil, anti-freedom, totalitarian, hates women, hates gays, hates sex, hates music and fun, and seeks to impose their views on the rest of the world.

These post-modern “Islam means peace,” types seem incapable of seeing that in spite of the clear evidence that wherever Islam rules, these horrifying policies are enforced.  And if we don’t push back against it, just like the political drift left that leads us to socialist polices that have never worked anywhere they’ve been tried, we’ll find ourselves drifting right into sharia law.  It’s certainly starting in Britain, which now has sharia courts.  The United Nations would silence opposition to Islam.

That is what the battle in Canada being fought by Ezra Levant and Kathy Shaidle is all about. It’s one front in the battle for the freedom of the west.  Also in The American President, an exasperated character retorts, “Oh, you only fight the fights you can win? You fight the fights that need fighting!”  This fight needs fighting.

What we really need is a “free speech surge” where people practice the right and obligation to offend.  In a couple of weeks, Salim Mansur, Kathy Shaidle and Ezra Levant will once again take up rhetorical arms in this fight.  But why not consider arranging debates and speaking opportunities in our own communities?  When I was producing talk radio I spent half the day on the phone arranging for guests, and people who’d written books were always eager to publicize them.  It doesn’t have to be expensive if you can find an author who lives in the region.  Here in the New Orleans area I’d bet the authors of the New Orleans Gun Grab would be interested in giving a talk on the 2nd Amendment.  Find out who lives and writes in your area.

How hard would it be to find a local conservative college group or hook up with some like-minded tea partiers or get to one of the Glenn Beck “We surround them” groups that are starting up all over the country?  Those are the people who would attend a free speech debate, and help organize and publicize it.  What if you pitted a local talk radio DJ against a lefty college professor?  The head of your local ACLU versus someone from the local homeschooling chapter?  Glenn Reynolds notes “a transition out of apathy, and a desire to show up and be counted, much like the Tea Party protests.”  It’s time to step up, get creative and build some momentum.

Kathy writes:

It’s also working. And it has to be done. If somebody has to do it, it might as well be me, and people like me.