Henrietta Hay's Column

Occasionally it takes an outsider to pull my thinking back into line. Recently I met a young man who is considering taking a job here in the communications field. We were discussing freedom of speech and I warned him that this is a fairly conservative community. He looked me square in the eye and said, "Freedom of speech is not a liberal issue." Whoa! Of course it isn't. It is an issue so basic to a democracy that it crosses all political lines and makes labels obsolete.

The First Amendment reads in part: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech or of the press..." You wonder how the old boys who wrote that could have been so wise. In a brand new baby country, how did they know that 200 years later we would be a huge, heterogeneous nation pulling in all directions and desperately needing something so fundamental to keep us together?

Free speech is a fragile thing. We take it for granted for ourselves, but at the same time we constantly try to deny it - to others. There are many who doubt that the Bill of Rights could be passed into law today, either in Congress or by a national vote.

Freedom of speech is under attack by both the extreme right and the extreme left. On the right we have the continued attempts at censorship of speech, writing and art. On the left we have something new known as Politically Correct speech. You almost need a program to know the players, and both are a threat to the First Amendment.

Through the years, it has been the liberals who have defended freedom of speech even when issues were uncomfortable and unpopular. The ACLU went to court to defend the Ku Klux Klan's right to march in the chiefly Jewish community of Skokie, Illinois. But some liberals have drifted considerably to the left and have lost their sense of humor.

Now we have P. C. In case you have been a cave for the past several months, that means Politically Correct and is a movement started by presumably well-meaning liberals, which says that speech, which is offensive to blacks, Hispanics, gays and other special groups, does not deserve to be protected. Most of it is so ridiculous that it will be laughed out of circulation very soon, but now and then it gets serious. Fortunately it is not always successful. At Denver University this spring, students tried to stop a class whose teacher they said was racist and bigoted. The class was protested and picketed, but it was taught.

On the other end of the political spectrum, we have the conservative attempts to censor the Maplethorpe photographic exhibit and the recordings of 2 Live Crew, which created domestic wars this past winter. The would-be censors say we must be protected from art, which is offensive to them, and the rest of us say we have the judgment to look at and listen to what we chose. In both cases the courts upheld the First Amendment.

I hate to bring up the Veggie bill again. It was designed to protect farmers and ranchers, but almost everybody outside the Legislature considered it to be unconstitutional and an attack of free speech. In this case both liberals and conservatives voted for it and it was still an infringement on the First Amendment.

Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. wrote in a recent case negating a law against desecration of the flag, "If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable."

However good the cause, any group which would try to withdraw First Amendment protection from their opponents must be aware that that if they succeed, protection may very well be denied to them too. Either we have free speech for everybody or we end up without it for anyone. It's a little like pregnancy. You can't be a little bit free.

My young friend was right. It is not a liberal or conservative issue. It is an American issue. Free speech - even when it is not pleasant or likeable - must be tolerated in America. Amendment One of the U. S. Constitution makes it so.