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 accused of "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. Each one of them had deeply held ideas of how a new baby country should be run but they shared one thing -- 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 added 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 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 the United States would become a nation of diverse peoples with different ideas and beliefs, and that we would have to tolerate other people's ideas.

Intellectual freedom distinguishes the human from other forms of life. The trouble is, we still have people trying to impose their individual values and ideas on the rest of us. They believe that they alone should have the right of free speech. They are the Censors. Censorship destroys the freedom of the mind.

Most censorship involves the written word. Once a year booksellers, librarians, journalists and publishers sponsor Banned Books Week - Celebrate the Freedom to Read. This week-long observance celebrates our freedom to read anything we want, the freedom to read without having the censor take our books away from us, the freedom to explore ideas without limit, the freedom to be in a minority and know that we have the same right of expression as the majority - and yes, the freedom to read bad books as well as good ones.

Other forms of expression are now under attack. As we speak Congress is trying to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts. The Senate rescued it last week, but there is still no assurance of financing. Some members of Congress do not approve of certain artistic projects that have been funded and therefore want to throw out the whole program. It's a good thing that Michelangelo sculpted David in 1504 and nudity was not one of the censurable subjects at that time.

The latest censorship fight is taking place on the Internet. Congress tried to get into the act and in the name of protecting our children, passed the Communications Decency Act, which would have threatened nearly everyone who writes on or reads material on the Internet. Fortunately, the Supreme Court unanimously declared it unconstitutional. The justices found that in seeking to protect young users, the law trampled on the constitutional rights of adults.

There are Internet filters and increasing demands for censorship, but as Brock Meeks wrote on that same Internet, "The Internet is an untamed resource, full of the good, the bad and the ugly -- just like schools, the streets and the shopping mall." The responsibility for what we read on it, and what our children read on it, rests on us. The only effective filter for a kid is his/her parent's brain.

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. The subjects the Censors have attacked have ranged from Communism to free love, to language to religion and most of all to sex. I wonder what the pet prey will be in 2000. Whatever it is, we'll still be in there defending freedom of speech.

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."