Column: Which rights are really in need of defending?

By STEVE NELSON

For the Valley News

Published: 04-24-2023 9:28 AM

“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”

attributed to Carl Sagan among others

Another batch of recent news stories covered academic debates about free speech, trigger warnings and other alleged instances of excessive sensitivity or closed-mindedness.

Example one was the free speech brouhaha that arose at Stanford Law School where a Trump-appointed conservative judge was disrupted by progressive protestors at a lecture sponsored by the Federalist Society. The Law School’s Dean apologized to the judge and sent a long scholarly paean to free speech to the community.

Example two was the rebuke by Cornell’s president of a student resolution asking that professors provide warnings when alarming, potentially traumatizing, material was in the offing. Her veto was described as a “hard no.”

The Stanford dean and Cornell president were enthusiastically applauded by their faculty members and nearly all who publicly commented on the reports.

“Enough of the damn coddling of this generation of entitled snowflakes who were probably never spanked, got participation trophies and need to grow up and get ready for the harsh realities of the ‘real world!!’ ” (I admit to liberal paraphrasing, summarizing and — perhaps — a tad of overstatement.) But the gist is accurate.

The only Times comment on the Stanford event with which I vigorously agreed came from Whit in Vermont who wrote:

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“So a judge, who had shown contempt for the human rights of others, wants to enjoy free speech as a human right himself? Free speech is an important right. But is it a more important right than those of life and liberty, for everyone? Those who have violated human rights should not be welcome anywhere in society, let alone on elite college campuses.”

Joining in Whit’s minority position, I added this in a recent blog post:

Although Duncan is not as ostentatiously provocative as some white nationalists and anti-Semites brought to campuses in the service of owning the libs, the Federalist Society’s wizards knew precisely what they were doing. Duncan is far from an exemplar of conservative legal scholarship. His record of denying basic human rights is his only distinguishing credential and the reaction to his appearance was predictable and played directly into the conservative grievance machine: “See! Look at these intolerant liberals who can’t even engage in a civil exchange of ideas!”

I have no patience for the only two constitutional rights that the conservative movement embraces: The unfettered right to own and use deadly weapons and the right to bitch about their First Amendment rights whenever their abuse of all the other rights is met with the disgust it merits. These rights, for example:

■The constitutional rights of women and girls to reproductive health autonomy are abused through judicial manipulation.

■The voting rights of Black and brown folks are abused through repression and gerrymandering.

■The right to a free and equal education is abused by conservative privatization and funding schemes.

■The rights to health care, housing, clean water and food justice are systematically denied.

■The constitutional right to live in a secular society is abused by the constant imposition of government-sanctioned religion.

■Workers’ rights and safety are under constant conservative assault.

Are we to accept that heckling a speaker at a law school is an equivalent — or greater — violation of human rights than insulting a transgender woman in a courtroom? (Yes, Duncan did that.) Objecting loudly — even crudely — to the assault on millions of LGBTQ folks’ rights is not offensive. Denying full rights to millions of gay and trans folks is offensive.

The response of progressive students to vile speakers on college campuses is not the problem. The calculated efforts of the right wing to take the country back a century or two is the problem.

The rights of women were not advanced through pleasant debate in law school classrooms. Civil rights required civil disobedience, not academic decorum. The immoral war in Vietnam was finally ended by spilling blood on draft files, sitting in the streets and the acts of courageous lawbreakers like Daniel Ellsberg.

The “free speech” argument is also specious. Private entities can repress or censor anything they wish, however misguided one may consider it. Construing the conservative judge’s speech as “protected” is a category error. It might be bad policy or bad behavior to shout him down or disinvite him, but he has no “rights” in this respect.

Progressives concede too much when yielding to “keep an open mind!” Screaming at a holocaust denier is not the moral equivalent of screaming, ”Jews will not replace us.” We ought not tacitly accept both things as “protected,” whether by the constitution or academic policy. Right wingers are running rampant with this kind of false equivalence. “Antifa is just like the Proud Boys.” “Black Lives Matter is just like the KKK.” “The courageous kids peacefully protesting gun violence in Tennessee are insurrectionists.” And so on, nearly ad infinitum.

So, while I understand the principle of open dialogue, I also share the outrage of those who are fed up with the rights of right-wing provocateurs being honored while the rights of their friends and loved ones are being trampled.

Which brings me back to Cornell. I don’t applaud the President’s “hard no.”

The desire of students to partially insulate their peers from revisiting sexual assault, racist violence or other traumas is a good and kind thing, not a violation of some abstract academic principle.

And kindness is something we could use a lot more of.

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