The treatment of GNEA illustrates one technique by which America's growing ranks of self-appointed speech police expand their reach: They wait until groups they disagree with, such as GNEA, are provoked to respond to them in public debates, then they persecute them for annoying those to whom they are responding. In Oakland, this dialectic of censorship proceeded on a reasonable premise joined to a preposterous theory.
The premise is that city officials are entitled to maintain workplace order and decorum. The theory is that government supervisors have such unbridled power of prior restraint on speech in the name of protecting order and decorum that they can nullify the First Amendment by declaring that even the mild text of the GNEA flier is inherently disruptive.
The flier supposedly violated the city regulation prohibiting ``discrimination and/or harassment based on sexual orientation.'' The only cited disruption was one lesbian's complaint that the flier made her feel ``targeted'' and ``excluded.'' So anyone has the power to be a censor just by saying someone's speech has hurt his or her feelings.
Unless the speech is ``progressive.'' If GNEA claimed it felt ``excluded'' by advocacy of the gay rights agenda, would that advocacy have been suppressed? Of course not -- although GNEA's members could plausibly argue that the city's speech police have created a ``hostile workplace environment'' against them.
A district court affirmed the city's right to impose speech regulations that are patently not content neutral. It said the GNEA's speech interest -- the flier -- is ``vanishingly small.'' GNEA, in its brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, responds that some of the high court's seminal First Amendment rulings have concerned small matters, such the wearing of a T-shirt, standing on a soapbox, holding a picket sign and ``other simple forms of expression.''
Congress is currently trying to enact yet another ``hate crime'' law that would authorize enhanced punishments for crimes committed because of, among other things, sexual orientation. A coalition of African-American clergy, the High Impact Leadership Coalition, opposes this, fearing it might be used ``to muzzle the church.'' The clergy argue that in our ``litigation prone society'' the legislation would result in lawsuits having ``a chilling effect'' on speech and religious liberty. As the Oakland case demonstrates, that, too, is predictable. |