My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 1, #34, April, 1996

LEGAL SPEECH STUPID SPEECH

There was a bit of a stir in the National Basketball Association recently when Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, a black Muslim player, refused to stand to attention for the playing of the national anthem. He believed his faith forbade paying tribute to nationalism, and he believed America was unworthy of respect because of its history of oppression.

Now, standing while the national anthem is played is not, in this case, just a normal expected mannerly behavior--it is actually required of players by the rules of the NBA. So the league refused him permission to play. Naturally, this cost him a fair amount of money. So he and the league arrived at a compromise: he would stand, but he would think of Allah, and not the United States.

Many of the players, when asked about this, stood up for Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, on the grounds that he had a constitutional right to freedom of expression-- even if that expression was one of contempt for something held sacred by the fans who paid his salary. He had a right to be rude.

I am really curious about what you in England make of this kind of legalistic, knee-jerk defense of our rights. Is this a peculiarly American thing, this kind of automatic resistance to arbitrary authority? It does seem that in America, when good manners are written into enforceable rules, it makes some of us instantly want to go out and break the rules. Certainly when some of our colleges developed codes of speech to prevent people from taunting others with racial or ethnic slurs, some students were overcome with an absolute lust to make rude racist remarks.

Maybe it's because we have freedom of speech and of the press written into our constitution that we get so legalistic about our right to say anything we want, by word or deed. And the Supreme Court mostly backs us up. It tells us, for example, that burning an American flag is constitutionally protected symbolic speech, an expression of contempt for our government. (It has not yet ruled on the question of whether punching someone out for burning our flag is also constitutionally protected symbolic speech.)

The thing is, we have a perfect right to say any number of things that, as decent, well-mannered people, we carefully refrain from saying. Most of us do not yell racial slurs when we see a black person. This is partly because most of us know this would be a needlessly rude and hurtful thing to do to another human being, and most of us know we would not be well-thought of if we did. Our right to cast racial slurs protects us from the law, but not from social consequences.

During the 1984 World Series (the Detroit Tigers vs. the San Diego Padres), Miller Lite ran an ad campaign in which they divided up the stadium crowd into one section yelling "Tastes great!" and another section chanting "Less filling!" When the series was over and the cameras went away, the "bleacher bums" (the people in the cheap seats) continued this happy tradition by dividing themselves into one group yelling "Eat s___!" and one yelling an antiphonal chorus of "F--- you!"

The Tigers owner, Tom Monaghan, a well-known Catholic philanthropist, was not happy about this. He was trying to promote baseball as a wholesome activity for the whole family, and the parents attending the games were upset at the bleacher bums' behavior. So Monaghan posted signs warning people against rowdy behavior and indecent language, and ejected offenders from the stadium. And the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against him, defending the right of the bleacher bums to yell obscenities.

Now, I am a fan of the ACLU, because I am a fan of the First Amendment. It says government shall pass no laws infringing on our rights to freedom of speech, press, religion, and peaceable assembly. Those rights are there to protect us against overweening government, because governments always have a tendency to steamroller people, to assert ever increasing powers. We need an ever-alert group like the ACLU ready to fight whenever government tries to usurp our rights.

But just because government cannot restrict our freedom of expression does not mean society cannot. Without having any recourse to law at all, society has two powerful mechanisms to control hurtful, hateful speech.

One is simple good manners. This is a device we need to assert more often than we do. We need to condemn tacky speech and behavior whenever we see it. When one of our congressional candidates (Mississippi's Mike Gunn) says "If guns are outlawed, how can we shoot liberals?", we should condemn him. When Gordon Liddy explains on the radio how to shoot federal agents to be sure of killing them, we should condemn him. When we hear people make ugly, racist remarks, we need to say, like Bruce Hornsby in his song, "The Way It Is," "Hey old man, how can you stand to think that way?" When someone tells a joke that is only funny if we accept a racist premise, we can use Miss Manners' ploy of sweetly and innocently asking the teller to explain why the joke is funny. When someone says something utterly horrifying ("AIDS is God's magic trick--it turns fruits into vegetables"), it is imperative that we be horrified. And that we say so.

That is our second defense against hurtful speech--more speech. It is the very premise behind the first amendment: that in a free marketplace of ideas, the good will win out over the tawdry and meretricious.

This does require a more active citizenship of us. It means that when we hear stupidity and prejudice on talk radio, instead of turning it off in disgust, we should call in ourselves and protest. It means that when we hear such talk in our own social circle, we shold make it clear that such talk offends us. We have the power to set social boundaries, to declare certain kinds of speech unacceptable.

Over the past ten years, we have made smoking unacceptable. Yes, we have made laws against it, but the laws came after social opprobrium--smokers had already been made to feel unwelcome before the law drove them outside to huddle in the cold indulging their habit. We can and should use the same power of contempt against unacceptably rude and unkind speech and behavior.

We have no problems with churches finding homosexual acts immoral and preaching against it. We should have a lot of problems when a minister leads his flock in picketing Randy Shilts' funeral (Randy Shilts was the homosexual reporter who wrote the definitive history of the AIDS epidemic, before dying of AIDS himself). This man led his picketers in taunting the friends and family who came to honor Randy Shilts memory.

Our First Amendment is a glorious protection to our rights. But it does not and should not mean that there will be no social consequences for offensive speech. We cannot, and should never be able to, send that minister to jail. But we can, and should, tell him that he is being unkind and malicious in the name of God, and that his actions are profoundly unChristian.

If we all expressed freely everything we thought about people, we would descend into barbarism and civil war. Social order and community depends upon us all NOT saying the things our constitution gives us a perfect right to say. What we need is less harping on rights, and a lot more training in good manners.

My Word's Worth Archive

Current column

Marylaine.com/ home to all my other writing

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.