Transgressors were drummed out of media, academia, and journalism when they failed to talk the party line. It was our own mini-version of the cultural revolution, when institutions like journalism and academia were slowly but steadily purified of those who wouldn't or couldn't toe the line. Radio talk-shows were the glaring exception. It's a strange commentary on a country when some of its most offensive public people help keep alive one of its most fundamental core values. America has never been at ease with the very freedom it brought to much of the world.
Free speech is always an ironic and timely fight here, the place that invented it.
They are not occasional, but endemic. It's a stunner that Hoekestra, the chairman of an investigative subcommittee looking into the NEA, has nothing better to do in Washington than watch movies about lesbians. In a country with as many unresolved issues and social problems as the United States, there is never any shortage of dim-witted, greedy, or opportunistic politicians lining up to tell us what we should be reading, seeing, or hearing. His constituents should recall this blockhead and make him download his sexy pictures on the Net like everybody else, at his own expense. But his bizarre posturing is another timely reminder that freedom of choice, like freedom of speech, is always on the line, often at the hands of the very people sworn to defend and uphold it.