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Don’t sacrifice free speech
to curb school violence,
ACLU counsel warns

By Mary Adamski
Star-Bulletin

The "zero-tolerance" policies imposed in American schools to curb violence cast an ominous shadow on the First Amendment, said national American Civil Liberties Union general counsel Susan Herman.

"It's exactly when we're afraid, it's exactly when we're offended that we need to protect the First Amendment," Herman told a Honolulu audience yesterday.

Parents have supported measures that curtail freedom of speech in the wake of the Columbine school shooting and other violent incidents.

"Some target students that are distinguished as dissidents ... who wear trench coats, who wear T-shirts with slogans deemed offensive, who maintain Web sites disrespectful of administrators."

She cited the example of a Florida teen-ager suspended from school for writing a short story about aliens abducting a school administrator, an action overturned by the court.

"What I find frightening is when members of a community believe exceptions need to be made to our guarantee of freedom of speech." She said community beliefs will eventually be reflected by court decisions.

Herman, a Brooklyn law school professor who frequently writes ACLU briefs in U.S. Supreme Court litigation, spoke at a forum on "Threats to Dissent in the 21st Century." The event at East-West Center marked the release of a biography on local ACLU founder Allan Saunders.

She described some of the 25 court cases in which the ACLU has challenged the administration of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani on First Amendment grounds. Many of the cases began with denial of a city permit to groups who wanted to demonstrate dissent or viewpoint, from taxi drivers protesting controls to the Million Youth March to the Ku Klux Klan -- "anyone the mayor doesn't like the content of their cause. The mayor doesn't get the First Amendment."

The civil liberties organization won 23 of the cases, and "in each case the court ruled that just because you don't like its content, you can't stop free expression."

Herman said the principle is clear to people when it is an issue of "resisting a state-sponsored bully. The danger is if we start thinking we can make exceptions. You can't deny speech just because it is offensive, you can't distinguish amongst content."

She said "one of the new threats in the 21st century is what I call the Rupert Murdochization of the media," referring to the chairman of the News Corp. who has acquired worldwide communications holdings.

"The smaller the number of media outlets ... the less difference of viewpoints we're going to get."

She said the Internet widens the possibilities of voicing dissent, but is also going to be the battleground for efforts to censor expression. Like the school "zero-tolerance" measures, fear and the goal of protecting children are behind efforts to set limits in cyberspace such as the Child Online Protection Act passed by Congress.

"The best antidote to bad speech is more speech," she said.