Don’t F*%# With My Speech…

Censorship is getting out of hand. I’ll admit that I’m very liberal when it comes to issues of free speech and maybe all that will change when I become a parent some day, but I think much of the current issues with free speech revolve around people’s perceptions of government and other governing bodies’ role in regulating and protecting. The protection part of the argument usually applies specifically to children. While I don’t want to debate the role of government in regulating speech at this moment, I just wanted to point out an increasing trend in censorship within schools that has started to disturb me.

A recent story today that got me thinking about this was a story about Seattle high school students who are suing their school over the school’s requiring them to submit their school newspaper to prior approval in terms of content. The issue that instigated the school’s “censorship” of the newspaper stems from an article about the hiring of the new school principal who students on the hiring committee claim was their third choice and as such, felt their views were ignored. (Not to belittle this issue, but I was surprised that a high school actually had student on a hiring committee for the principal.)

Another story of school newspaper censorship occurred recently in Tennessee. The student newspaper was recalled after a story about birth control and another story about tattoos was published. The reason cited was the graphic nature of the articles and the varying age of the student population. Because if you don’t talk about birth control, then teenagers won’t know that sex is possible.

As a former editor of a high school newspaper, I have nothing against guidance from teachers and advisors in terms of a school newspaper. It’s in the best interest of the students because to be honest, as a teenager, I didn’t know jack about a lot of the rules and ramifications of some of the things we wrote, but this doesn’t mean I think censorship is okay. In both of these instances, the students were not in the wrong. The content should not have been censored; advisors role should be to ensure accuracy and to avoid possible legal action like libel. It’s action like these that cannot only ensure good writing, but good habits and understanding among students.

Not necessarily related to censorship, but more so intolerance (and somewhat related to my previous post on the “War On Christmas”) I was watching MSNBC (Scarborough Country) last night. I really don’t know why I watched so much of MSNBC last night. The title of the discussion was “Is Hollywood Out Of Touch?” and focused on “Brokeback Mountain” the ubiquitous “gay cowboy movie.” The argument was that a “gay cowboy movie” is not inline with the majority of beliefs (morals) in America. My first question was: “Why does this matter?” Hollywood is not obligated to follow any line in terms of the stories it portrays. Of course it started to make a little more sense when William Donahue, president for the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, started talking. His argument was that Hollywood was anti-Catholic and more reprehensible was the fact that it was more gay-friendly than Catholic-friendly. A lot of this originates from the idea that Hollywood is run by Jews which obviously leads to it being anti-Catholic. Whatever. The best part was Donahue’s statement that the Catholic League monitors TV and movies for things it finds offensive and that so far this year it had found 22 TV shows and 5 movies that it found offensive. He then challenged GLADD to find 27 programs that if found offensive. Ummmm…how is this even a logical argument? We’re supposed to feel sympathetic for the Catholic League because it finds more things offensive in Hollywood than a traditionally oppressed group? And Dani wonders why I dislike the crazy Catholics…