The right-wing threat to free speech

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"Activists on the right have long been adept at using progressive theories of censorship to restrict the speech progressives would protect. Censorship has always been a bipartisan vice." https://spiked-online.com/2022/01/20/the-right-wing-threat-to-free-speech/#.YewnYB0ULG4.twitter Nice essay via Wendy Kaminer
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The right-wing threat to free speech
The Republican campaign against critical race theory has become dangerously censorious.

The right-wing threat to free speech

The Republican campaign against critical race theory has become dangerously censorious.

WENDY KAMINER
COLUMNIST
20th January 2022

{snip}

A plethora of pending and enacted red-state laws now ban the teaching of ‘divisive concepts’, barely defined, under the guise of banning so-called critical race theory. (Pen America produced a devastating report on these bills, which I discussed on spiked here.) ... Supported by right-wing book banners, like the deceptively named Moms for Liberty, these laws promise individual parents the power to ban books and lessons that offend them, and, in some cases, to initiate potentially lucrative private lawsuits against alleged offenders.

Consider this exemplary Oklahoma bill, opposed by the United States Free Speech Union (USFSU). It would allow any individual offended parent to remove books from public schools that ‘make as their primary subject the study of sex, sexual preferences, sexual activity, sexual perversion, sex-based classifications, sexual identity, or gender identity’. As USFSU senior fellow Jon Zobenica explains, this bill ‘grants any and all Oklahoma parents and legal guardians veto power over which books may be stacked on the shelves of Oklahoma public-school libraries’. It also provides ‘swift and punitive consequences for non-compliance with parentally imposed bans’.

Consider too the controversy over book banning in Virginia that helped elect the Trump-lite Republican, now governor, Glenn Youngkin. It arose from the efforts of one mother to ban Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved because it allegedly gave her 17-year-old son nightmares. Former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe was condemned for opposing her efforts and clumsily noting that parents shouldn’t be telling schools ‘what they should teach’, a remark for which he was predictably and justly roasted. But it was taken out of context: he was referencing the effort of one parent not simply to excuse her own child from an allegedly nightmarish reading assignment, but to remove the offending book from the shelves, effectively dictating what other people’s children might read. As the offended mother acknowledged, ‘I want to make sure every kid in the country is protected’.

Don’t be surprised at her arrogance in assuming she knew which books endangered ‘every kid in the country’. It is the arrogance of all censors, right and left, who aim to ‘protect’ everyone from speech they dislike, or to protect themselves from the threats of opposing ideas. {snip} This isn’t a freedom fight. It’s a power grab.

Wendy Kaminer is an author, a lawyer and a former national board member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

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