Freedom of speech vs. intolerance at a college publication
When a story about a college paper hits Jim Romenesko’s web site, a news hub for journalists, it’s a big deal–at least in the media world.
On Friday, Romenesko featured a Seattle Times story about a paper at the University of Washington that ran the following illustration alongside a column opposing gay marriage:
The student columnist, John Fay, argued his case:
Once you’ve legalized gay marriage, why not polygamy, incest, bestiality or any other form of union?
Students at the school were outraged, the Times reported:
Organizers of the campus group “Students for a Hate Free Daily” say they expect about 300 people to show up for a campus rally today after more than 1,000 signed up with the group online. The Graduate and Professional Student Senate, meanwhile, passed a resolution this week demanding the paper apologize. [...]
Freshman Kyle Rapinan, who is organizing today’s rally, said the column is homophobic and incites “fear and hate.” The Daily staff should take sensitivity training, he said, and have better protocols for dealing with delicate topics.
I’d agree that the column and accompanying illustration are wrongheaded, disrespectful, and irrational, and I admire the outrage of Rapinan and others. Yet I have to differ with my fellow progressives in blaming the student paper, which simply served as a medium for a conservative argument we’ve all heard before.
Frankly, when critics say the column “incited fear and hate,” I think they mean to say they were offended. So what? We should tolerate ideas that differ from our own and that we find abhorrent, just as we expect others to do for us. There’s no other option in a free society.
The appropriate response to a laughable, conservative argument like this one isn’t to stamp it out–it’s to engage it.
If progressives want to win the fight against homophobes and gay marriage opponents–and right now, we’re not winning–we need to convince people that legalizing gay marriage is not a slippery slope to bestiality, polygamy, and incest, among other things. (Another fine solution: Get government out of the marriage business.)
We can start by focusing criticism on the proper target: the incredibly strong forces working to perpetuate intolerance, not the mainstream student press for printing what has become, sadly, a widely-accepted belief.
