Rush Has the Right to Speak

I am finding it fascinating to watch how our society deals with the recent outbreak of overt misogyny on the right. We are a people with traditions, most of us descended from immigrants who come from lands with traditions, our way of life developed in an agricultural economy that supported a pretty strict separation of gender roles and then everything changed. There is a revolution going on but we are taking our time with it, learning how to adapt to an economy where women are equal to men in every way. Amazing progress has been made in the last fifty years but we have not yet emerged into the new era.

In this transitional state we saw the amazing reaction when the Susan B. Komen Foundation, all in pink and apparently supporting women's health, decided to de-fund Planned Parenthood as part of a rightwing stealth campaign against abortion services. Their decision was met with outrage from across the country, as it turned out that Americans actually love their Planned Parenthood. As a country we humor our anti-abortion neighbors, we don't argue about it at dinner parties but when you get down to it, most Americans understand that the service needs to be available so women can choose to use it, or not -- most thoughtful people understand that.

Then there is the Rush Limbaugh debacle. Listen, you know he talks like that every day, right? He's been doing it for decades. But when ordinary people were exposed to his foul talk they were sickened. Again, we're polite, we don't discuss politics at dinner, but when you get down to it most people are decent and reject extreme beliefs like Limbaugh's.

Interesting opinion by Scott Blakeman in Huffington Post this morning. One representative paragraph:

The true test of defending freedom of speech is whether you defend speech that is hateful and totally without any redeeming value whatsoever, like what Rush Limbaugh said. Because once you start making exceptions to free speech, you are on a path to losing the right to speak freely altogether. I Hate What Limbaugh Said and Support His Right to Say It

This thinking is dangerously confused, it's like religious nuts who claim their freedom of speech is threatened when people don't want to listen to their hateful statements. You don't have to defend something just because somebody says it. Discrimination is a good thing sometimes.

Rush Limbaugh has every ounce of freedom of speech that the Constitution guarantees him. You can invite him to your house so he can call your daughter a slut and if you enjoy that you can invite him again sometime. He can book himself in an auditorium and call every woman in the place a slut and a prostitute, he can ask everyone on birth control to post movies of themselves having sex on the Internet. He is free to do that.

The irony of course is that it is not the government that is choking off his speech, the Obama administration hasn't censored him -- he is being stopped by the free enterprise system that he claims to believe in.

They say now that he has lost 140 advertisers, and according to MSNBC, "Premiere Networks, the syndicator of Rush Limbaugh’s show, plans to suspend national advertising for two weeks." Without advertising he has no job and no platform for his free speech.

You might have heard the saying, "There is freedom of the press for those who have one." You have the right to publish anything, but that doesn't mean anyone is going to pay the costs to print it and distribute it. Same here, Rush has the right to say anything he wants, but if people don't want to hear it, if there is no market for it, then he will be speaking freely to himself. Oh, maybe fans want to hear him insult people, but the great majority of people oppose what he is saying to the point that, when they go into the store to buy things, they might decide not to choose a product made by a company that advertises on Rush's show.

Let's not confuse these two important concepts, freedom of speech and the necessity of people to regulate themselves. In our little county we have a group of people who take every opportunity to say terrible things about gay and transgender people, and they have the right to do it. The government can't stop them, and I wouldn't want them to. But we have a responsibility as decent citizens to speak out against them, to use facts and reason where they express prejudice and hatred. Democracy and freedom can only work if people participate. Someone may have the right to say something without government interference, but we are not required to stand by and listen politely.