Henrietta Hay's Column

From the beginning of recorded history some people have been trying to impose their individual values on what others can think and say. The writings of Homer and Aristophanes were suppressed in Greece in the 4th century. Socrates drank the hemlock because he was "corrupting the young with ideas of freedom." Dante's Divine comedy was publicly burned in Italy and Galileo was forced to recant on his knees the thesis that the planets circulate around the sun.

The 55 men who sat down together in the City of Brotherly Love to construct a new nation thought they could make it different here. Every one of them had deeply held ideas of how a new baby country should be run but they all shared a vision of freedom from oppression.

After much shouting and arguing and compromising, these highly disparate forefathers of ours came up with a set of rules, called the Constitution of the United States. They realized that it wasn't going to work unless "certain unalienable rights" were protected, so they included a Bill of Rights. One of those guaranteed that, "The Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the freedom of speech."

Because of their wisdom and vision and good common sense, we have in this country the legal freedom to explore ideas and speak as we choose. They had the vision to see that America would become a nation of diverse peoples with different ideas and beliefs, and that we would have to tolerate other people's ideas.

The trouble is, we still have people trying to impose their individual values on the rest of us. They believe that they alone should have the right of free speech. They are the Censors. As a life long civil libertarian, my files and my brain are overflowing with material I have acquired over years of battles against attempted censorship. I agree with George Bernard Shaw who said that, "Assassination is the extreme form of censorship." It is happening today in the women's clinics.

Censorship destroys the freedom of the mind. Intellectual freedom distinguishes the human from all other forms of life. Justice Douglas said, "Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."

Most censorship involves the written word, but sculpture, painting, morals, political ideas and religious beliefs are feeling the heavy hand.

The list of books which have been banned somewhere includes practically all literature. It includes such titles as Oliver Twist, Huckleberry Finn, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, American Heritage Dictionary, Lord of the Flies, Diary of Anne Frank, Tarzan, certain translations of The Bible, The Grapes of Wrath, Mother Goose, Woman in the Mists: the story of Dan Fossey and the Mountain Gorillas--- and on and on and on.

Certainly there are lots of bad books, but we don't have to read them. My idea of a bad book may well be someone else's favorite. The Constitution protects all speech, coarse as well as fine, vulgarity as well as elegance. It even protects lousy grammar and poor spelling.

The Censor says we must protect our children. Certainly we must. That's what parents are for. We have strong child pornography laws in Colorado and they are strenuously enforced. But should all literature, all ideas, all creativity be aimed at satisfying the 10 year old reader? Clare Boothe Luce suggests that, "Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there."

The Censor wants to censor only that with which he disagrees. But he forgets that if one person loses the right to speak, eventually we will all lose it. The majority has little need for protection. It is the nonconformists who are at risk and for whom civil liberties offer a defense against efforts of the majority to limit the speech and actions of those it finds objectionable.