Harry Reid Hates the
Redskins
The U.S. Senate's speech enforcers won't stop
with the NFL.
By Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal
Harry
Reid is the Majority Leader of the Senate of the United States.
He occupies a position
of influence at the pinnacle of the American system of government. Of late, the
senator from Nevada has become a one-man, First Amendment wrecking crew.
If like Charles and David
Koch, your political opinions offend Harry Reid's ears, or if like the
Washington Redskins, your taste in sports-team logos offends his eyes, Sen.
Reid will use his office to try to shut you up or make you disappear.
For those who think
the Kochs or the Redskins' logo are unsympathetic victims, think again. The
enforcers Sen. Reid is leading will get around to you eventually. In some
places, they already have.
Sen. Reid, with Sen.
Maria Cantwell of Washington state, outputted a letter signed by a total of 50
Democratic senators and addressed to National Football League Commissioner
Roger Goodell. It condemns Washington D.C.'s NFL team and its owner Daniel
Snyder for not abandoning the team's logo, the Redskins.
The letter calls the
Washington Redskins a "racial slur." Sen. Reid has accused the
Washington Redskins of a "tradition of racism." The letter says
"Redskins" is the equivalent of the racist remarks of Los Angeles
Clippers owner Donald Sterling.
Continuing in this
vein of senatorial logic, the 50 members of the world's greatest deliberative
body more or less order Mr. Goodell ("Now is the time for the NFL to
act") to use his power to coerce a name change for Washington's football
team.
Should Commissioner
Goodell buckle beneath Harry Reid's gang tackle, make no mistake: That same Senate
letter would go straight to Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, ordering
him, under the Sterling Precedent, to kill the Cleveland Indians' logo, Chief
Wahoo. Were Mr. Selig to do so, there of course would be riots in the streets
of Cleveland, whose single most beloved citizen is . . . Chief Wahoo.
In recent weeks,
people across the political spectrum professed to be aghast when a small
coterie of "offended" students shut down commencement speeches by
conservatives, centrists and liberals.
At Smith College, they
didn't want to hear IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde.
At Haverford College, they'd only let former Berkeley Chancellor Robert
Birgeneau speak if he signed a letter of apology and guilt for his handling of
the Occupy Cal sit-ins in 2011. How, the world of astonished adults wondered,
have these students come to believe they could shut people up on any aggrieved
whim?
They got it from the
Majority Leader of the United States Senate and 49 senators. They got it from
the many adults who think a little restriction on some speech is OK, and
then cry shock when the mob goes too far. That Senate letter isn't just about
the Washington Redskins. It's part of a broader, active effort to define and
limit what people can say—not just in politics or sports, but anywhere anyone
tries to open his or her mouth.
The New York Times,
the New Republic and others have carried articles on the suppressive phenomenon
known as "trigger warnings" for college courses. The idea is that
professors should post warnings about course content that may
"trigger" traumatic memories or thoughts in some students for a list
of reasons related to feminist concerns, sex and multiple violations of social
justice. Look for a letter soon from Harry Reid
to Turner Classic Movies demanding trigger warnings on John Ford westerns.
Last fall at a private
party at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., two athletes—one of them
white, the other black—were overheard trading racial jokes during a game of
beer pong. Someone reported them to the administration. Lewis & Clark
convicted the students of hate speech and ordered them to undergo "Bias
Reduction and Bystander Intervention Training." To their credit, 40 Lewis
& Clark professors signed a letter of concern about the school's notion of
due process. American academics must be worrying they may have to go
underground to teach freely. We could soon see samizdat doctoral theses.
In another corner of
Harry Reid's Senate sits an attempt to expand federal surveillance of
"hate speech." Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts just introduced a
bill called the Hate Crimes Reporting Act. Its purpose, said Sen. Markey, is
"to ensure the Internet, television and radio are not encouraging hate
crimes and hate speech that is not outside the protections of the First
Amendment." The potential causes of offense are "gender, race,
religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation." In other words, anything.
Sophisticates will
recognize that the bill should be better known as the Shut Up Fox News and Rush
Limbaugh Act (newspapers are protected from any such regulation). But on their
current, unrestrained course, federally deputized talk censors would get around
to cleansing and sterilizing MSNBC, too.
We are moving way past
the amusements of political correctness. A creeping, even creepy, effort is
under way to shut people up for a broad swath of offenses. The distance is
shortening between the First Amendment's formal protections and a "Fahrenheit
451" regime for torching speech in America. The time for adult pushback is
overdue.
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