|
Free speech in America has always been defended forcefully by the political left—until now! Peggy Noonan has pointed out several piercing examples of the left’s silencing of alternative voices:
1. At Columbia University, members of the Minutemen, the group that patrols the Mexican border, were asked to address a forum on immigration policy. As Jim Gilchrist spoke, students stormed the stage, shouting and knocking over chairs and tables. One of the students said that “the Minutemen are not a legitimate part of the debate on immigration.”
2. On a CBS program, Brian Rohrbach, the father of a child killed at Columbine, responded to the Amish slaying mentioned above as evidence of America being a culture that “teaches there are no moral absolutes” and he cited several examples. He was silenced in the media as not a legitimate part of this debate.
3. Barbra Streisand, at her recent concert at Madison Square Garden, waxed eloquent against the Republican party, and then someone in the audience challenged her talk and she cursed him and became enraged like an immature teen.
4. Rosie O’Donnell, on “The View,” did not allow one of her guests to challenge her opinions about gun control.
Noonan writes: “What is missing from the left in America is an element of grace—of civic grace, democratic grace, the kind that assumes disagreements are part of the fabric, but we can hold the fabric together.” The old liberal values of free and open speech and free and open inquiry are gone—and we are all the worse because of it.
See Noonan’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal (14-15 October 2006). |
Listen