Daily Archives: March 19, 2015

FAAA Lecture Series: The Strange Death of Free Speech in Modern India
Speaker: Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta Saturday 7 February 2015, 5.30pm Venue: GIDC Bhavan, CEPT University.

By: connectCEPTU

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FAAA Lecture Series: The Strange Death of Free Speech in Modern India - Video

Americans tend to pick and choose who should be afforded civil liberties to some degree, acenturies-old issue that has flared up once again after a video ofracist chants byUniversity of Oklahoma fraternity brothers went viral. The university's president David Boren last weekexpelled two studentsfilmed making the racist chants.

The popularity of Boren's actions may be hard to nail down (more on that later), butone fascinating trend in public opinion has been quite clear.Americans have becomemore supportiveof free speech for a variety of controversial groups in recent decades, but thisgrowing acceptancehas not extended toracists.This finding comes from thelong-running General Social Survey of U.S. adults.Last year the surveyfound 60 percent saying a "person who believes blacks are genetically inferior" should be allowed to make a speech in their community, similarto the share who said so in 1976 (62 percent).

That absolute number might be surprising - a clear majority are okaywith a racist speaking out - but they also contrastwithlarger and growing shares of the public who supportallowing speech from othercontroversialgroups. Some 70 percent support allowing a speech from aperson who wants the military to run the country (70 percent), a communist (68 percent), and an anti-religionist (79 percent).The only group where people expressed less support for free speech than racists was "a Muslim clergyman who preaches hatred of the United States" -only 42 percent said this should be allowed. These trends were documented by Tom Smith and Jaesok Son of NORC at the University of Chicago in 2013.

Changing politics as well asattitudes toward sexuality and religion help explain how free speech forsome groups has become more tolerable while support for racists have stayed lower.The Cold war is over,fewer people identify with a religious faith than in the 1970s andacceptance ofhomosexuality has grown rapidly.The stagnation of tolerance for racist speech while support for speech among other groups has grown -- could indicate that the public is not purely becoming more tolerant of the rights of groups they dislike. Instead, the shifts could reflect greater public agreement with the ideas of gay and lesbian people and those who are less religious.

Reactions to the Oklahoma case could be toughto gauge if past surveys are any guide, perhaps due to the difficulty in balancingbetween support forfree speech in general and a desire to quashracism generally.Two national surveysin 1989 and 1991 found aboutsix in 10 saying college students who use racial slurs or published racist magazines should not be expelled. But a similarly large majority in a 1992 survey by Family Circle favored probation for aBrown University student who yelled racial slurs while drunk. More recently, a 2008survey by the First Amendment Center found 54percent disagreeing with the idea thatpeople should be allowed to say things in public that might be offensive to racial groups.

Peyton M. Craighill contributed to this report.

Surveydetails

The General Social Survey was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago usingin-person interviews with a random national sample of 2,538 adults from March31 to Oct.13, 2014. Results on attitudes toward racists are based on 1,711 interviews and have a margin of sampling error of three percentage points.Data analysis was conducted by The Washington Post.

Question wording

There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. If [INSERT]wanted to make a speech in your community [INSERT],should he be allowed to speak, or not? Answers: Yes, allowed/Not allowed/Don't know/Refused

Link:
Americans growing support for free speech doesnt ...

A federal appeals court decided 2-1 Wednesday that a transit agency in the Seattle metropolitan area did not violate free speech rights by refusing to accept an anti-Israel advertisement.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district judges decision in favor of the King County Metro system, which at first accepted and then rejected an advertisement that called on the U.S. to stop funding Israel.

ISRAELI WAR CRIMES, read the ad, submitted in late 2010 by a group called the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign. YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK.

News of the countys approval provoked an uproar. Critics swamped the transit agencys call center with angry emails. Some of the protesters threatened to vandalize or disrupt service if the ad was carried.Others said they feared that the controversy would make the buses unsafe. The controversy attracted international attention.

Two pro-Israeli groups then decided to submit their own ads, which carried images of bloodied bus passengers and a burning bus.

IN ANY WAR BETWEEN THE CIVILIZED MAN AND THE SAVAGE, SUPPORT THE CIVILIZED MAN, one of the pro-Israel ads said.

Photographs of dead and injured bus passengers were left under the door of the Metro Customer Service Center. Scrawled across the pictures, there was a message: NO TO BUS ADS FOR MUSLIM TERRORISTS.

In revoking approval for the anti-Israel ads, the county decided that noadvertising related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be permitted. The anti-Israel group challenged the decision as a violation of freedom of speech.

Judge Paul J. Watford, writing for the 9th Circuit, said the county officials genuinely feared that public safety was at risk.

Municipalities faced with the prospect of having to accept virtually all political speech if they accept any regardless of the level of disruption caused will simply close the forum to political speech altogether, said Watford, an Obama appointee.

Read more here:
Court rules Seattle did not violate free speech in rejecting anti-Israel ad

What is the greatest threat to free speech in America?

The question was the subject of a lecture this week at Temple University Law School delivered by Floyd Abrams, long one of the nations most prominent First Amendment litigators.

Mr. Abrams, a partner Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP, points his finger at academia. Heres an excerpt from his remarks, which were posted online by legal blog Concurring Opinions:

[P]ressures on freedom of expression and all too often the actual suppression of free speech comes not from outside the academy but from within it. And much of it seems to come from a minority of students, who strenuously and, I think it fair to say, contemptuously disapprove of the views of speakers whose view of the world is different than theirs and who seek to prevent those views from being heard. The amount of students who will not tolerate the expression of views with which they differ is less important than the sad reality that repetitive acts of speech suppression within and by our academic institutions persist and seem to grow in amount. And that is shameful.

Mr. Abrams highlights a number of a recent examples of recent campus speech controversies, such as the one that flared at University of California-Irvine earlier this month after student leaders there sought to ban the display of the American flag from a campus lobby.

He also talks about the decision last year by Brandeis University to offer and then withdraw an honorary degree to a human-rights advocate and former Dutch lawmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali because of her criticisms of Islam.

And Mr. Abrams recounted last years free speech fight at Rutgers University involving former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who reversed her decision to give a commencement address after her selection as speaker drew protests from some students and professors.

Mr. Abrams concludes:

What can one say about this other than to quote from the statement of the American Association of University Professors that, in the clearest language,observed that [o]n a campus that is free and open, no idea can be banned or forbidden. No viewpoint or message may be deemed so hateful or disturbing that it may not be expressed. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. put it well, when he was a Harvard undergraduate before the Civil War and was a student editor of Harvard Magazine. We must, he wrote in 1858, have every train of thought brought before us while we are young, and may as well at once prepare for it.

Link:
Floyd Abrams: College Campuses Pose Greatest Threat to Free Speech