The date was June 25, 1963. It was late on the last day of the N.C. legislative session. House Speaker Clifton Blue had just “suspended the normal rules of consideration” and, following brief debate, H.B. 1395 was passed.
The N.C. Senate then took its turn. There, Senate President Clarence Stone refused to recognize speakers, and through voice vote, the Speaker Ban Law became law. No veto power was then available to Gov. Terry Sanford.
The law prohibited public universities from hosting Communist or subversive speakers, or speakers that had pleaded the Fifth Amendment to questions about Communist or subversive affiliations.
Covertly, university system President William Friday encouraged student body President Paul Dickson to challenge the law. Dickson promptly invited Communist Party member Frank Wilkinson to speak on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. So, the scene called out for confrontation.
And Students for a Democratic Society answered the call. With ACLU backing and Dickson named plaintiff, they sued. Subsequently, a three-judge federal district court declared N.C.’s Speaker Ban Law unconstitutional.
But it was a bittersweet decision. Unlike what students sought, it voided the law because it was vague, not because it curtailed free speech.
Supreme Court decisions have held conclusively that there is a First Amendment right to receive information. The right to receive information is a corollary to the right to speak.
The pertinent part of the very First Amendment to our U.S. Constitution, part of our “Bill of Rights,” says, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . . .” It was ratified on Dec. 15, 1791.
Since, brave individuals have invoked the First Amendment to challenge numerous government attempts to censor free speech rights. But that hasn’t stopped censors from trying.
Have a look: The Comstock Act of 1873, enforced till 1965, prohibited mailing or even possessing “immoral” birth control information. In 1997, the Supreme Court voided the Comstock Act while nullifying a law banning contraceptive use, in a separate case. Similarly, in 1996 the Communications Decency Act outlawed internet transmission of “obscene or indecent” messages, ostensibly to protect persons under 18. The CDA was declared a violation of First Amendment protections in 1997.
Historically, libraries and schools have been ground zero for censorship struggles. Notable free speech defenders have been the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Library Association: ACLU for legal representation, the ALA because libraries are where the books are.
The hot spot for censorship has been sex. ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom compiles a 10 most challenged book list. For 2019, eight concerned LGBTQ subjects.
Ultimately, thought control is the censors’ aim. On Jan. 4, 2021, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued new “gender-neutral” rules for House publications. Examples: “seamen” is canceled in favor of “seafarers”; mother or father becomes “parent.” And on April 5, NASA published its own list of “gender-inclusive” adjectives. Manned spaceflight now becomes “human” spaceflight; unmanned spaceflight becomes “robotic” spaceflight, and so on.
At its essence, censorship is subversive. Listen to Ben Franklin: “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.” And Thomas Jefferson: “Information is the currency of democracy.”
It’s important to remember that First Amendment free speech protections only extend to government restrictions. Non-government private censors may trample free speech with impunity. And they do.
Today’s censors comprise a “cancel culture.” Universities have “safe places,” code words, and trigger warnings to shield students from “offensive” ideas. Over 200 universities now have “bias committees.” Facebook, Twitter and YouTube cancel accounts that fail to fit their notions of acceptable content. Statues that might offend someone, anyone, are toppled.
Amazon.com hugely personifies the cancel culture. With its “delisting policy,” Amazon selectively cancels conservative books like “When Harry Became Sally” and documentaries like that about Supreme Court Justice Thomas, “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words.”
Amazon says it is just doing what all book sellers do. But Amazon sells 50 percent of all books and 80 percent of all digital books sold in America. That outsized platform allows it to manipulate much of what we read.
Increasingly, the cancel crowd is an Orwellian threat to liberals as well as conservatives. On July 7, 2020, a letter appeared in the liberal Harpers.org containing over 52 mainly liberals’ signatures. It sounded the alarm about the cancel culture, a product of liberals’ own making: “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.”
And former ACLU president Nadine Strossen, no right-winger, opines in her new book that “Americans feel more pressure to conceal their viewpoints today than during the McCarthy era.”
Welcome to the brave new world.
Michael Smith is a Southern Pines resident.
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April 18, 2021 at 02:00AM
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Column: Cancel Culture Grows Where Free, 'Correct' Speech Meet - Southern Pines Pilot
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