Tag Archives: free speech

First Racism, Now Bullying (Cont’d)

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I first posted on this subject last week.  It’s a matter that concerns a school administrator’s definition of a student’s essay, written for a sanctioned debate, as bullying  for the sole reason, apparently, that the essay expressed opposition to adoption by gay couples.  In that post, I wrote that I had emailed District Superintendent Todd Carlson, the administrator who found the dissenting opinion an act of bullying, the following questions:

1) The hoo-raw is about a student newspaper op-ed debate in the form of an essay supporting gay couple adoption and an essay opposing gay couple adoption.  Is this a fair characterization of the newspaper’s debate?
2) I request access to copies of the student essays written in favor of and in opposition to gay couples and adoption.
3) You are reported as saying “It is a form of bullying or disrespect to a group of people” in reference to the “anti” essay.  Is this an accurate quote?  If so, please advise how the “anti” position could have made without such bullying.  What terms and arguments would have been acceptable?

Dr Carlson has chosen not to respond.

Mathew Staver, founder of the Liberty Counsel, wrote to Dr Carlson also decrying the Superintendent’s bullying.  Staver described Carlson’s own bullying.

He’s using his position to bully this student. This is absolutely the epitome of intolerance….
When Mr. Wegner stated that he did not regret writing [the essay], and that he stood behind his beliefs, Superintendent Carlson told him that he “had got to be one of the most ignorant kids to try to argue with him about this topic[.]”

Then came the threat.  Carlson told Wegner

[W]e have the power to suspend you if we want to.

Although Dr Carlson declined to make the boy’s essay available to me; Staver obtained a copy of both essays in the debate, apparently from a copy of the student newspaper in which the essays originally appeared.  He made the essays available at the above link, and both essays can be read here, as well.

Read the essays, and decide for yourselves whether the boy is “bullying” anyone.

In the meantime, it’s curious that Carlson refuses to explain his own actions, or to explain the manner in which an opposing opinion could be couched in a non-bullying manner.

First Racism, Now Bullying

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Apparently, disagreeing with a Progressive Politically Correct position is bullying, when it’s not racist.

A Wisconsin high school invited debate on the subject of gay couples and adoption, and then they censored the debate when some debaters actually came out in opposition.  The original debate was in the form of a “pro” essay and an “anti” essay in the high school’s student newspaper.  It seems, also, that the “anti” student grounded his/her argument in religious theory.

Having found some folks in their high school with the temerity to oppose the idea, the school and school district administration have fallen all over themselves to apologize for those unruly students who took the idea of open debate seriously.

Offensive articles cultivating a negative environment of disrespect are not appropriate or condoned by the Shawano School District.  We sincerely apologize to anyone we may have offended and are taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future.

Todd Carlson, the Superintendent of the school district, went further:

We do apologize.  We have a responsibility as a school district to make sure we create a positive school climate and culture. This article probably didn’t go along with the policies and the guidelines and the practices that we have as a school district.

And the pièce de résistance.  Carlson added:

It is a form of bullying or disrespect to a group of people – that’s right.

Of course the bullying and disrespect to another group of people—those opposing gay couple adoption—doesn’t enter into it.

This is bad enough, but the school not only has objected to just one side of the students’ debate, it has also refused to comply with requests of outside journalists to read the entire essay (and so I cannot offer anything from the offending essay, either, beyond the brief snippet cited at the link above).

As long ago as John Milton, the concept of freely expressing disagreement with established opinion was recognized as central to individual liberty.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.

Our own Declaration of Independence acknowledges that among our individual endowments of inalienable rights is the right to liberty, of which absent free exchanges of ideas—free speech—there can be none.

John Stuart Mill understood this.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.  If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth:  if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

US District Judge Roger Titus, District Court for the District of Maryland, understands in a related case,

[W]hile Mr. Cassidy’s speech may have inflicted substantial emotional distress, the Government’s Indictment here is directed squarely at protected speech: …uncomfortable…speech….

And now we have the Left’s version of free speech.  Hmm….

I’ve emailed Carlson the following questions; I’ll post again when I hear from him, or next Friday if I’ve not heard back by then.

1) The hoo-raw is about a student newspaper op-ed debate in the form of an essay supporting gay couple adoption and an essay opposing gay couple adoption.  Is this a fair characterization of the newspaper’s debate?
2) I request access to copies of the student essays written in favor of and in opposition to gay couples and adoption.
3) You are reported as saying “It is a form of bullying or disrespect to a group of people” in reference to the “anti” essay.  Is this an accurate quote?  If so, please advise how the “anti” position could have made without such bullying.  What terms and arguments would have been acceptable?

Whose Free Speech Is It, Anyway?

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These days we have reports of “Occupiers” planning to disrupt the Iowa Republican Primary caucuses, with one young woman justifying the disruption by saying that “all we have is our bodies, and we need to do what we can to have our voices heard.”

Last week, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann was disrupted during a campaign appearance in Iowa City as “Occupiers” shouted her down and drown her out—so that only “Occupiers'” voices would be heard.

The same week, Speaker Newt Gingrich’s appearance at the Iowa State Capitol building was disrupted with the same “my free speech, not yours” technique by other “Occupiers,” and for the same reason.

The “Occupiers” plainly believe that their free speech rights don’t end where anyone else’s free speech rights begin.  The “Occupiers” insist that only their speech is appropriate to be heard.  They’re not only attacking the speakers’ rights to speak, though, with their behavior; they’re destroying everyone else’s, also: they intend, as they have been doing all along, to dictate to you and me what speech we will be permitted to hear.  We’re not to be allowed to decide for ourselves.

These are the folks, and this is the philosophy, that the Democratic Party actively supports.  But the “Occupiers”—and by extension, our Democrats—aren’t upset that their voices aren’t being heard; they’re upset that they are not being heeded.  So they’ll “do what we need to do.”  Your free speech doesn’t count.