New Republic Article

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

From: lesikar () tigger stcloud msus edu (arnold v. lesikar)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.correct,alt.comp.acad-freedom.talk
Subject: New Republic Article
Date: 29 Sep 93 00:04:02 GMT


The following excellent article appeared in the New Republic Magazine. I
have excerpted the opening paragraphs. The complete text is available on
the Internet:
-----------
Why civil liberties pose no threat to civil rights.
Let Them Talk
By Henry Louis Gates Jr.


A review of "Words That Wound:
Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech
and the First Amendment"
by Mari J. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado and
KimberlE Williams Crenshaw
(Westview Press, 160 pp., $46.50, $15.95 paper)


I.


"As a thumbnail summary of the last two or three decades of speech
issues in the Supreme Court," the great First Amendment scholar Harry
Kalven Jr. wrote in 1965 in The Negro and the First Amendment, "we may
come to see the Negro as winning back for us the freedoms the
Communists seemed to have lost for us." Surveying the legal scene in
the heyday of the civil rights era, Kalven was confident that civil
rights and civil liberties were marching in unison; that their mutual
expansion represented, for a nation in a time of tumult, an
intertwined destiny. He might have been surprised had he lived to
witness the shifting nature of their relations. Today the partnership
named in the title of his classic book seems hopelessly in disrepair.
Civil liberties are regarded by many as a chief obstacle to civil
rights. To be sure, blacks are still on the front lines of First
Amendment jurisprudence--but this time we soldier on the other side.
The byword among many black activists and black intellectuals is no
longer the political imperative to protect free speech; it is the
moral imperative to suppress "hate speech."


Like such phrases as "pro-choice" and
"pro-life," the phrase "hate speech" is ideology in spansule form. It
is the term-of-art of a movement, most active on college campuses and
in liberal municipalities, that has caused many civil rights activists
to rethink their allegiance to the First Amendment, the very amendment
that licensed the protests, the rallies, the organization and the
agitation that galvanized the nation in a recent, bygone era.
Addressing the concerns of a very different time, the hate speech
movement has enlisted the energies of some of our most engaged and
interesting legal scholars. The result has been the proliferation of
campus speech codes as well as municipal statutes enhancing penalties
for bias crimes....
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The complete article is available at via gopher.netsys.com at port 2101.
Look for the Archive menu selection. After selecting the Archive, make the
following menu selection: "September 20, 1993 - Let Them Talk By Henry
Louis Gates Jr."


Alternatively, you can find the New Republic Magazine under the category of
"All the Gophers in the World." You can also reach it from the "Electronic
Newsstand" selection under "All the Gophers in the World."


The article is well worth reading by all who are interested in preserving
the First Amendment right of freedom of expression.


arn
lesikar () tigger stcloud msus edu