What a month this has been for the First Amendment, which protects us from getting arrested, but not from getting yelled at or even fired.
Stephen Metcalfe’s deconstruction of Imus’s downfall has the best explanation I’ve seen yet for Imus’s “funny” riff on abusing some young women who play college basketball. Imus and his fans felt free to enjoy a wide range of sexist or racist insults because they were “really” mocking Political Correctness and boring old middle-class decorum. Says Metcalfe,
In talk radio, the P.C. bogey is kept on life support, the better to allow the heaping of abuse on the marginal and disenfranchised to pass itself off as speaking truth to power.
In other crazy-speech news, the rightwing program of “abstinence only” sex education, financed by our tax dollars, turns out to be useless in protecting young people from any of the bad outcomes that sex education is supposed to help them avoid.
I fear this may be a bad thing for my corresponding suggestion of “Abstinence-Only Drivers’ Education.”
p.s. Even more photos of this inspiring car…
Update: Not so funny, but more eloquent–Ronni Bennett defends free speech. And taking a cue from David Weinberger’s “Moral means ambivalent,” I also was more eloquent in 2003:
Moral absolutes–they’re easy to ridicule when they’re the “absolute” morals of born-again Baptists from Birmingham, Alabama. But we on the Left have our own cherished absolutes–and we need to refresh our ambivalence about them too.
Is any remark claimed as “authentically Black” immune from criticism? If so, does that make any XX type who ever had sex a ho? Or should we switch perspective, and say any statement that degrades women is evil, deserving of powerful retaliation? If so, does that mean we should demand lip service to middle-class ideals before any kid from the ghetto gets to speak?
No–absolutes make for fast and powerful moral judgments, but not for intelligent moral judgments. Because….
Moral means ambivalent.