THE BELL CURVE:Free speech’s prickly versatility

Last week, two news stories, which have carried over through a space of days in the local press with apparently little in common, seemed to me to have a significant connection. First came the rhubarb over dropping the Pledge of Allegiance at Orange Coast College student government meetings. Then came the participation of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama — an admitted, gasp, liberal — at an international conference on AIDS hosted in Orange County by Rick Warren, pastor of a 20,000-member evangelical church, Saddleback Church.

The connection? In both instances, large segments of local people were hearing points of view with which they strongly disagreed in a venue with a normally much higher comfort zone in which they were deeply invested. In one instance, evangelical convictions, in the other, public education.

Evangelicals, once committed to the position that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexual behavior, have been slow to respond to the growing use of condoms to check the disastrous spread of AIDS. But not Warren, whose approach is mirrored in the title of his conference, “We Must Work Together.” He answered angry criticism of his invitation to Obama with a statement that “Pastor Warren and Saddleback Church completely disagree with Obama’s views on abortion and other positions he has taken … [but] our goal has been to put people together who normally won’t even speak to each other…. The HIV/AIDS pandemic cannot be fought by Evangelicals alone.”

Thus, Warren and the people he invited to his conference have been able to separate the voices speaking out from the positions they represent and to debate these various views of how to attack AIDS while fighting off critics who would demonize the people who hold them. That, unfortunately, hasn’t taken place in the Pledge of Allegiance dust-up at OCC, where efforts are now underway to punish the students who voted out the Pledge of Allegiance.

It’s hard to allow the possibility that there remains anything new to say about this controversy that the Pilot Forum page hasn’t thoroughly exhumed, but let me at least give it a shot.

The great preponderance of letters to the Pilot on this issue have supported the recent return to reciting the pledge at student government meetings, a position that can be both explained and defended. But many of these letters have also attacked the students who voted the pledge off the agenda, regarding their position as unpatriotic and indefensible, more than sufficient reasons, the critics contend, to support an effort to remove them from the board. In that process, the issue has become emotional rather than rational.

Some typical examples. One letter writer wants to send the three students who voted to discontinue the pledge “to China to live.” Another found their taking offense at the reference to God as “misplaced sensitivities.” Yet another wrote, “If they are so offended by it, they can either be silent when it is recited aloud or … they can leave this great nation of ours.”

There is plenty of solid footing for the OCC student trustees who cut the pledge from their agenda. It has a dubious history for a patriotic icon, created more than a century after the Founding Fathers by a socialist author most interested in stressing, “liberty and justice for all.” And also for the addition of “under God” as a counterpoint to the anti-communist excesses of the Joe McCarthy period. The pledge has been found by a federal circuit court — in a decision later overturned by the Supreme Court — to be in violation of the separation of church and state. And it is also certainly open to challenge on the appropriateness of many of the events in which it is recited — rather like patriotic bumper stickers.

Thus, this is an issue that can be argued on its merits, especially on whether a student board meeting is an appropriate venue for reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. And whether “under God” is a clear violation — as the circuit court decided — of the separation of church and state. The greatest irony in all this is that instead of these honestly debatable points, the pledge controversy has been turned by its critics into an emotional questioning of the patriotism of the students who withdrew the pledge.

Those critics who would send the offending students off to other countries to find out how good it is here might better take that advice for themselves. The students they criticize are exercising their 1st Amendment rights to free speech, and the system under which we all live provides means to remove them from office if they no longer represent the people who elected them. The toughest thing to learn about the 1st Amendment is that we have to put up with free speech we don’t like in order to preserve and protect the free speech we love and support.

In the two instances noted above, I see useful lessons in democracy. People who find it Christian to visit the agony of AIDS on a whole segment of humankind are being moved by free speech to supporting a means of alleviating that agony. And people who are supporting free speech only as it squares with their own views are being shown that they have to buy the whole package.