ACLU speaker at EKU

Local News

October 10, 2009

Bill Robinson The Richmond Register Sat Oct 10, 2009, 06:55 PM EDT

The best way to combat offensive speech is to answer, not try to suppress it, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union who spoke Thursday night at Eastern Kentucky University.

Instead of cowering as victims in the face of hate speech, those who counter it with positive speech find it an empowering experience, said Nadine Stossen, who led the ACLU from 1981 until 1998.

While criminal suspects have the constitutional right to remain silent, those who oppose hate speech and are not afraid of freedom have the right not to remain silent, she said.

Stossen cited the example of a black student at an Arizona university, who organized a rally to counter a demonstration by others who espoused racist opinions.

The counter rally allowed the overwhelming majority of students to express their disapproval of the other group’s hate speech, she said, and the student who organized the counter rally was later elected president of the student body.

Stossen’s visit to campus came on the heels of a controversy over an EKU policy that limits public speeches and other forms of expression by non-members of the university community to two “free-speech” zones.

University officials have said the policy was used mistakenly to order four student demonstrators away from near the entrance of the Keen Johnson Building during a recent visit by U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler, D-Sixth District.

Stossen complimented EKU President Doug Whitlock, faculty and students for “impressive strides forward” toward ensuring free speech, but urged them not to rest until they had turned the entire campus into “the free-speech zone that it should be.”

Remaining limitations on free speech does not make EKU unique, she said.

“All too typically on college campuses and in many other venues around the country, constitutional rights that in theory could be enforced in a court of law are not fully respected in reality,” Stossen said.

“Constitutional rights are not self enforcing,” she said. “The determined effort of ‘we the people,’ is required to turn constitutional guarantees into reality.”

She said that idea was stressed by James Madison, principal author of the Bill of Right and for whom Madison County is named, who called the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution “‘a mere parchment barrier’ between the rights of the people and government abuses.”

The Bill of Rights “is not worth the paper it is written on,” Stossen said, “unless we the people are aware of them and demand that our government officials, including our university officials, respect and honor those rights.”

The ACLU was founded in 1920, she said, “to provide lawyers for ordinary people and transform rights written on paper into reality everywhere, including on college campuses.”

The type of speech most commonly suppressed on campuses and elsewhere in the country, Stossen said, is so-called offensive speech.

The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates radio and television broadcasters, has been imposing congressionally mandated fines of $325,000, for the single utterance of a word or brief image regarded as offensive, she said.

Such heavy fines has led even large networks, and certainly small stations, to censor content, Stossen said.

The concern about giving offense, she said stems in part from the increasing diversity of the American population.

“If we allowed government to punish any speech that any person or groups finds offensive,” she said, “we’d probably have little if any speech left.”

So-called hate speech is one of the most censored types of speech, Stossen said, but the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently ruled that speech which majority finds offensive may not be suppressed.

She quoted former Supreme Court Oliver Wendell Homes who once explained that “the speech we hate is the speech that most needs protection.”

The courts have allowed speech to be suppressed only when there is a “clear and present danger” that it will lead to immediate, actual violence, “Stossen.

While the government can punish hate crimes, “hate speech” is protected by the constitution, she said.

Stossen’s visit to campus was sponsored by the University’s Chautauqua Lecture series, which is focusing on “Open Inquiry” this year.

Members of the EKU chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom handed flyers to people entering the Wallace building to hear Stossen that criticized the lecture series for invite mostly liberal speakers to participate. The only conservative included in the series was one who was invited last year to engage a liberal speaker in debate.

Bill Robinson can be reached at brobinson@richmondregister.com or at 624-6622.

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