TheWrap.com generously applied the protest label to a tiny group of Occupy Wall Street protesters railing against the right to cuss on the small screen.

The Supreme Court began hearing arguments today about censorship issues pertaining to television, highlighted by cases like Cher’s use of the “F” word on a 2002 Billboard music telecast. And those uniquely fragrant Occupy Wall Street types were there to lend some moral clarity to the debate.

About half a dozen protestors were in front of the court yelled slogans like: “You can kill people half a world away, but you can’t say ‘fuck….’”

Meanwhile, inside the building, the justices wrestled with whether the FCC has the constitutional right to enforce rules prohibiting obscene language and nudity on broadcast television and radio.

If the Occupy censorship movement swells, and who thinks it won’t, the next event could see a baker’s dozen protesters fighting the censorship loving one percent.

UWS theater professor Dr. James Miller is relatively new to the short-lived, now cult hit TV series “Firefly.”  Some of his students are loyal fans and asked Dr. Miller to check it out for himself. He liked it enough to hang a Firefly poster on his office door. Given its remote location in the theater wing, where mostly only theater students would see it, who would have expected the poster to cause such a firestorm?

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reports:

On September 12, 2011, Professor Miller posted on his office door an image of Nathan Fillion in Joss Whedon’s sci-fi series Firefly and a line from an episode: “You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.” On September 16, UWS Chief of Police Lisa A. Walter notified Miller that she had removed the poster because it “refer[s] to killing.” After Miller replied, “respect my first amendment rights,” Walter wrote that “the poster can be interpreted as a threat.” Walter also threatened Miller with criminal charges: “If you choose to repost the article or something similar to it, it will be removed and you could face charges of disorderly conduct.”

In response to Walter’s censorship, Miller placed a new poster on his office door on the 16th. The poster read “Warning: Fascism” and mocked, “Fascism can cause blunt head trauma and/or violent death. Keep fascism away from children and pets.”

Walter escalated the absurdity. On September 20, she wrote that this poster, too, had been censored because it “depicts violence and mentions violence and death” and was expected to “be constituted as a threat.” She added that UWS’s “threat assessment team,” in consultation with the university general counsel’s office, had made the decision. College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Interim Dean Raymond Hayes then scheduled a meeting with Miller about “the concerns raised by the campus threat assessment team.”

The university has since canceled the meeting as of last Friday, but it hasn’t backed off its position.

Sorensen, however, dug a deeper hole. Together with Provost Julie Furst-Bowe and Vice Chancellor Ed Nieskes, Sorensen defended UWS’s censorship in an email to all faculty and staff on September 27. The three administrators wrote that “the posters in question constituted an implied threat of violence. That is why they were removed.”

To understand the importance of this as a First Amendment issue, one needs to closely examine what happened.  A university’s Chief of Police/Parking Enforcement Officer, ignorant of the context of the quote, took it upon herself to remove not one but two posters without ever asking their context or purpose.  The professor honestly expected his First Amendment rights would not be infringed, but the school’s Chancellor cowered behind bureaucratic zero tolerance policies and did just that.

Whether or not you agree with how the professor responded, the police chief clearly overreacted to something she misinterpreted.  You can read the full exchange of those emails at FIRE.  Nothing about the poster of a fictional TV Space Captain is intended to “cause others to fear for their safety”; in fact, it is the opposite of a threat.

Dr. Miller sent the administration the relevant clip from Firefly’s pilot episode Serenity.  The context of the quote is an homage to fair play and a code of honor that obviously prefers non-violence.

This is precisely the issue with freedom of speech; words are subjective and can be interpreted differently by separate individuals.  Sometimes this is done unintentionally, sometimes with malice, which is why the act of deciding what’s NOT free speech is ripe for abuse.  The UWS administration’s stated desire to “promote a campus environment that is free from threats of any kind—both direct and implied” may be well-meaning, but its meaning amounts to nothing.  How does one set a universal standard to determine what is an implied threat or in what context speech may “refer to violence and/or harm”?  As Dr. Miller pointed out in his email response to police chief Lisa Walter, would this also apply to “a poster from Hamlet? Or a news clipping about Hockey players that commit violent murder?”

When asked if he knew of any other examples of such posters or signs on campus, Dr. Miller replied that while he wasn’t aware of any prior attempts at censorship, a “Kill Bill” poster from the popular Quentin Tarantino film was prevalent on campus earlier in the year.  Some quick research finds the poster was actually a parody of the Kill Bill movie, as part of a campus-wide protest held in February against Governor Scott Walker’s budget bill.

Oddly enough, police chief Walter was not at all concerned with the reference to killing or to the weapon of violence depicted in those posters.  In fact, she was quoted in this article at the time as being rather complimentary of the activities.

“The neat part of working in a university is that folks get to have their voices heard, and we try to make sure that it’s done in a manner that’s orderly and doesn’t disrupt the rest of the operations too much,” she said.

Walter also pointed out that the university’s union officers are not included in the exemption Walker provided to other law enforcement officers, firefighters and the State Patrol.

“He did not exempt UW police, Capitol police and, I believe, DNR wardens,” she said. “They will lose their ability to negotiate and have a union negotiate other work-related — other than salary. If the bill goes through, they will be without a contract — and without a union — on March 15.”

Is this because the police chief was not only overseeing security at the protest but also voicing her vested political interest in the highly controversial issue at hand? It seems clear that she was immersed in the context of that poster.

Words are subjective, indeed.

American Universities and colleges today are now, by design, overwhelmingly leftist in their belief systems and political activities.  Students and faculty alike frequently glorify monstrous leftists like Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara.  To some, they are socialist revolutionary heroes, while to others their image alone is testimony of mass murder and oppression.

When Ward Churchill was fired from his job as Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2007 for engaging in research misconduct, scholars insisted that Churchill was singled out for his political views, most notably his statements about 9/11 in which he “referred to the ‘technocrats’ working at the World Trade Center as ‘little Eichmanns.‘” There continues to be an outpouring of support for Churchill from the academic community, many of whom have stressed that Academic Freedom must be staunchly defended.

Whither tolerance and intellectual diversity?

The University of Wisconsin-Madison was recently ordered by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to pay nearly $500,000 in legal costs to a student group that claimed its First Amendment rights were violated when the student government rejected a portion of its funds because they were earmarked for religious worship. Badger Catholic, a student Catholic group that conducts various religious and spiritual activities on and off campus, sued the university, which claimed that funding some of the group’s activities would “amount to an illegal endorsement of religion.” The Appeals Court disagreed with the University and the Supreme Court recently declined to hear the case. It’s been hailed as a victory for freedom of speech and religious expression on college campuses.  $500K was lost because, rather than protecting the fundamental rights of its students, the school chose to discriminate against their activities purely because of the group’s religious beliefs.

While the flap over the Firefly poster may seem trivial, it is anything but.  This incident and UWS’s ego-driven, bureaucratic response provides a teachable moment.  It should make us pause and think about how easily our freedoms can erode, in the arbitrary name of protecting others’ feelings.

It’s one thing to ensure that students and faculty are physically safe, but when we surrender to the Wordsmiths what may or may not offend someone or make them uncomfortable, we are helping to pave our own Road to Hell.

“Sure as I know anything, I know this – they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin’. I aim to misbehave.” – Mal Reynolds, Captain: Space Boat Serenity

Looks as though the times really are a-changing:

Counter-culture hero and 1960s protest singer-songwriter Bob Dylan got a rapturous welcome from fans on Wednesday at his first ever concert in China, despite having agreed to sing only an approved set designed not to offend political sensitivities.

Famous for his songs against injustice and for civil liberties and pacifism, Dylan struck a cautious line in Beijing and did not sing anything that might have overtly offended China’s Communist rulers, like “The Times They Are A-Changin”.  …Promoters tried to bring Dylan to China last year, but the Culture Ministry did not give its approval, as is required for any concert in the country.

China’s agreement this year came with the proviso that Dylan “performed with the approved content”, according to a brief statement issued last month by the ministry, which gave no other details.

Dylan’s concert comes at a sensitive time in China, where musicians and artists have always had to contend with at least a measure of government control and censorship.

More here.

Dr. Gribben is afraid that the language in the book has stopped people from reading Twain. I am sure this brilliant move will encourage students everywhere to put down the video game controller. It will also save overworked teachers from actually having to teach the context of the use of the word. In order to do that, they might have to do some research and, heaven forbid, read the books themselves. What teacher has time for that when there are condoms to be distributed and prayer circles to be broken up?

Of course, elitists who have jumped up to protest this censorship. Movie reviewer and social gadfly Roger Ebert made the mistake of using the word that shall not be spoken or written in a tweet opposing the new edition. He thought because of his lifetime of liberalism and marriage to an African-American woman he was on the white guys allowed to use the word which shall not be spoken or written list, but alas he was not and was roundly “critweeted.”  (This is a new word I have invented to describe the criticism of a tweet by tweeting.)

Now that the looming “Huck Finn” controversy is finally behind us, we can get to the business of creating jobs. Think of all of the unemployed and underemployed English majors we can busy doing the task of politically “correcting” the rest of the great and not so great works of literature. We could hire half a Bryn Mawr graduating class just to edit the works of Toni Morrison.

Think about it: just by editing the word which may not be spoken or written out of  “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Heart of Darkness,” “Go Tell it On The Mountain,” “Lord of the Flies,” and a thousand other works of literature, we could drop the unemployment rate a point or two. Then we could start on other ethnic insults which are more subtle. I see full-employment on the horizon.

The real problem is when we get to books like Dick Gregory’s autobiography.  Its title is… The word that shall not be spoken or written: An Autobiography.

Maybe we should ask him?

Gregory has said that the word that shall not be spoken or written should not be censored nor should euphemisms be used. He finds it intellectually dishonest. The same sentiment has been expressed by Professor Randall Kennedy, a Harvard Law School instructor and writer of books and essays on the use of  the word which may not be spoken or written.

Ahhh, what do they know?

Vive la censorship! Vive la revisionism!

While the nation pondered its dense history of homophobic bullying after a string of gay youth suicides starting popping up on the front pages, the trailer for the Ron Howard “comedy” The Dilemma was released with a “gay = stupid” joke as its lead. What would otherwise pass by as an unexamined passive slam against an already-maligned group became no longer acceptable.

The line was unintelligibly defended by Howard, Vince Vaughn, and numerous web commentators who think that a joke too lazy and immature for anybody over 13 to find funny is the same thing as South Park-style take-no-prisoners satire. It’s lazy comedy, and the reaction to it is further evidence that we as a culture have shifted from our Eddie Murphy Delirious days: homophobes, not homosexuals, are now the subject of derisive humor. As The Kids Are All Right and Modern Family have shown, you can have great comedy about homosexuals without making fun of homosexuality.

And where exactly will the local burning of the “Blazing Saddles” and “Birdcage” DVDs take place?  How about at the free needle and condom exchange where we turn in our incandescent light bulbs and Happy Meal toys?

If making fun of homosexuality is now off limits, what’s next? Christianity? Conservatism? Southerners? Caucasians? Men? Dads? Fundamentalists? I think not. I think what we have here is a short but exclusive bus that parks in a Satire Free Zone.

Sorry, but you can’t inoculate a particular thing or person or group from satire and/or ridicule unless you’re in favor of inoculating everyone under the same premise. In the case of our gay friends, the absurd premise appears to be that who we are is off limits to humor. You can have a gay character in a sitcom but you can’t mock the gayness.

Okay. Fine. Un-American, unconstitutional, immoral, but fine. So how exactly will this slippery-slope of new rules work for the rest of us?

Southerners are stereotyped and ridiculed and mocked everyday in popular entertainment culture, which is no different than mocking someone’s sexuality. After all, targeting identity is targeting identity. And yes, Big Hollywood is the first to fight back when we see our side taking a pop culture beating. But there’s a big difference between fighting back; which is nothing more than being a part of the debate, and demanding it stop altogether; which is a declarative call for stifling debate and free speech.

The Trojan Horse for this latest PC-fascism push is this whole bullying meme. No one hates a bully more than I, but in this case it’s Film School Rejects and their leftist ilk doing the bullying; commanding from some phony moral high ground that those of us who don’t shut up as commanded are in some way responsible for these tragic suicides. Newsflash…

What attracts bullies is and always will be one thing: weakness. And if you want to prove you’re weak, a good way to start is with the whine of, don’t make fun of me.

The only people I would inoculate from ridicule are those who are unable to fight back. Trig Palin, for instance, and others similarly handicapped. But all this PC energy is instead being used to protect those who recent history has shown are more than capable when it comes to standing up for and defending themselves. You would think the gay community would be more insulted by those insisting they need some kind of unique sticks-and-stones protections than some dumb joke about electric cars.

And this has caused an outcry among bloggers. Censorship, they moan.

For example, a TechDirt dweller frets that “the government is resorting to more traditional censorship methods: pressuring companies to silence Wikileaks.”

And there’s Valleywag, who scolds Amazon for being “weak-willed,” suggesting that “avid readers … are unlikely to enjoy doing business with Amazon if they think the company is censorious.”

But the blogger reminds us that, being a private company, Amazon “is of course free to pick and choose what it wants to sell.”

Thanks Valleywag!

At this point, I think we need a palate cleanser:

—–

Anyway, if you think Amazon is a wuss for dumping Wikileaks, fine. But you’re a dope if you think it’s censorship. And every time you call censorship on something that isn’t censorship, you make real censorship that much harder to take seriously.

Fact is, if you want to read the leaked stuff, you can- for the rest of your damn life. But no one is obliged to make it any easier.

And, as someone who sees a link between behavior and consequences – I think anyone hosting Wikileaks, or entering into confidentiality agreements with them – are selfish pawns. You pretend it’s about journalism and free speech, when it’s really about getting the scoop first. Who cares if it harms anyone.

So pipe down with your censorship, twerps. Find other crap to whine about. Like that my book, “The Bible of Unspeakable Truths,” is currently ranked 12,485 on Amazon. In my mind, that’s the real outrage.

And if you disagree with me, you sir, are worse than Hitler.

Tonight:

Diana Falzone

Gavin DeGraw

Will Cain

and maybe Andy

The Los Angeles Times:

If Sony made “Karate Kid” with a Chinese partner, it could be a part of that Asian gold rush, but the deal would come with some foreseeable obstacles, including possible government censorship.

Belgrad didn’t think long before giving his answer. “That was enough to say yes,” says Belgrad, who had long been fascinated by the country and had developed a “Sinbad” movie that would be set there. “It’s a fascinating place.”

Here’s the story’s best quote by way of  James Lassiter, one of the film’s producers.

Try to film a movie in Brentwood, and the locals will grudgingly get out of the way. Do the same outside of Beijing and the rules are different. “The people run the country,” says James Lassiter, who is Overbrook’s president and serves as a “Karate Kid” producer. “So if people didn’t want you shooting in their neighborhood, there’s no authority that can tell them they have to. That’s why it’s called the People’s Republic of China.”

The people run China, a country so much more democratic than that awful, stifling Brentwood, U.S.A. 

Is it willful ignorance or just ignorance?

Censorship must die!

In response to Islamic reaction over the movie Fitna, which juxtaposes images of Muslim violence with passages from the Qur’an (the same passages Islamic terrorists cite as justification for their violence), writer Sam Harris at the Huffington Post penned one of the best critiques of Islam (and our refusal to engage it) I have ever read: Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks.  In it, Harris rightly points out: 

The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence. 

There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for “racism” and “Islamophobia.” 

Our capitulations in the face of these threats have had what is often called “a chilling effect” on our exercise of free speech. 

In Mark Goldblatt’s Reason Magazine article this week The Poet Versus the Prophet he expands on many of Harris’ arguments and states: 

[O]ur tip-toeing around Islamic sensibilities is nothing more than plain, old-fashioned cowardice….  We lack the moral courage to walk the walk, to put our individual lives on the line in order to defend the principles of free thought and free expression—the very principles that allowed the Judeo-Christian West to leave the Islamic East in the dust, literally and figuratively, three centuries ago. 

Goldblatt makes multiple excellent points throughout his piece and closes with: 

Since 2001, many Americans have asked how they can contribute in a direct way to the war against totalitarian Islam. Now we have an answer. If it’s legal, and likely to offend the radicals, just do it. That seems straightforward enough. But how many of us will have the nerve to stand up to a million or so Muslim dirtbags, and to scores of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of their fellow travelers and psychic enablers, and say in unison, “You want to kill the Enlightenment, you’re going to have to come through me. 

Islam is not above question, criticism, critique, or examination.  In fact, Islam is fourteen centuries overdue for some serious questioning, criticism, critiquing, and examination.  People the world over need to be reminded that the freedom of speech most certainly includes the freedom to offend.  The right of non-Muslims to draw pictures of Muhammad is equaled by a right just as powerful, the right of Muslims to ignore pictures they find offensive.    

Though I can’t believe I am going to quote Captain Jean Luc- Picard, there is no better way to express why tomorrow’s world-wide event is so important:  

“We’ve made too many compromises already, too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no farther!” 

While Picard goes on to say that he will “make them [the Borg] pay,” that’s not our job.  Our job is to stand and defend free speech.  No more outrageous outrage and Muslim grievance theater over cartoons, operas, and videos.  

We will no longer retreat.  We will no longer fall back.  We will no longer demand from every other community on the face of the planet that they meet us on the playing field of civilized, rational discourse, yet carve out a special, protected, no-holds-barred zone for Islam.  

It’s over.  This far and no farther. No more special treatment.  It is time for Islam to come into the 21st century. 

This is why I support “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day.”