September 26th, 2012, Hazelwood vs Kuhlmeier

In 1988, a principle censored a student newspaper and deleted two articles, one about pregnancy and one about divorce. He didn’t give students a chance to fix the articles, just deleted them. When he students heard, they took it to court, saying that it was impending on their rights to free speech. The court decided 5 to 3 that the principle had the right or censor he newspaper, because it was a “private forum.” The reason they called it a private forum was that it was not a space for any student to write, just the ones in the journalism class. The principal has all the rights he wants to censor the paper.

This directly relates to me because I am on the school newspaper. I am a news editor, a news a reporter, and he copy editor. Most of what I do is news, so its easy to keep my bias’s out of the writing. However, when I write or edit features, I have a hard time keeping my beliefs out of it. Even in a recent news article I wrote, an important quote had profanity in it, and I had to deiced to censor the direct quote or not. I asked my teacher, and she said that under our policy and mission statements, I couldn’t say the word fa***t in the newspaper, even if it was a quote. 

I do think that this is a fair verdict for the case. The school is probably funding the paper, and so they get to decide what they publish and what they don’t. Through this decision, the principle probably saved a lot of controversy and troubles for the school, even if they did end up going to court...

September 25th, Free Speech Forum; Howl for Carl Soloman by Allen Ginsberg

September 25th, Free Speech Forum; Howl for Carl Soloman by Allen Ginsberg

Howl For Carl Soloman: A four part poem about conformity, homo and heterosexuality, opening minds, and inner truths.

This poem was first recited in 1956, and written in the 1950s by Allen Ginsberg. Allen was a confused homosexual. Growing up, his mom had mental breakdowns, attempted suicide once, spent more than one year in a mental institution, ended up getting a lobotomy and dying from a brain hemorrhage. Allen himself ended up in a mental institution before Howl was first published. He claims that while he was there he found heterosexuality, but about a year after he got out, promptly fell in love with a man.

It was first published through City Lights Book Publishers. The owner and manager of the bookstore were both arrested for the publishing the poem, as it was called obscene, rude, and homosexual. Specifically 5 lines:

       who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- 

              ing their money in wastebaskets and listening 

              to the Terror through the wall, 

     

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through 

              Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, 

       

       with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al- 

              cohol and cock and endless balls, 

   

  

       who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly 

              motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, 

       who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, 

              the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean 

              love, 

     

They, the manager and owner of City Lights, took their case to court, and won. During the trial, 9 literary experts talked on behalf of the poem, saying it was poetic license and that the world needed this kind of speech. Exactly, it was claimed to be “redeeming social importance.”

Another reason this poem was such a big deal was that it started the beat generation. In his poem, part four, he says: Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady, meaning Peter Orlovsky, Carl Solomon, Lucien Carr, Jack Kerouac, Herbert Huncke, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, who were some of his beatnik friends, a lot of them rumored to be homosexual.

The 1950’s were a time of conformity and idealism, where being the American family was living the life. Allen Ginsberg called upon people, “the best minds of his generation” to see what people are doing and to not be such a conformist. 

September 24th, Shouting Fire and Teenage Ignorance

This particular conflict spawns from a teenage boy who decided that on The Day Of Silence, a day all about acceptance, he was going to wear a t-shirt with the words, “Be ashamed, our school has embraced what God has condemned,” and on the back he quoted the scripture, “Homosexuality is shameful.” In the end, the court ruled that the school was correct in their policy of offensive speech, and that this boy was wrong to write that on his T-Shirt. The teen gay suicide rate in America is so high, why should this ignorance be permitted? I guess I just don’t understand where the teen is coming from.

I’m all for expressing your rights of free speech, and I believe that this boy has a right to get his message out to the public, just like anyone else. However, he needs to do it in a way that doesn’t directly offend homosexuality. If he would have written something else on his shirt and probably done it on a different day, I don’t think that it would have become such a big deal. In other words, if he would have used his brain and not have been so ignorantly offensive, he would have been fine. He asks during his segment “Since when do schools censor things that are offensive, strictly on that basis?” My answer to that is as soon as he chose to go to public school. By going to a governmentally funded school, he follows the schools rules. Period.

Another question that comes to mind with this is what other students are allowed to wear/use. A swastika patch?  A confederate flag? A large,  wooden cross?  May a student carry a rope tied into a noose?  These things are symbolistic. Yes, a swastika has a history of being a violent symbol, but isn’t it actually a very old symbol of being united? Even if someone is against Jews, he or she has that right, as long as they aren’t directly offending them in a way like the ignorant teenager did. All of the things on this list are symbolistic, and so, different than directly telling people that the lifestyle they lead is shameful.

Hypocrisy East and West

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/09/201292063638169981.html

The amount of hypocrisy in this world is astounding. All I can think about when I read this article is how even though this man is saying that his point is to unveil hypocrisy in both sides, he has a very apparent bias. As he speaks about the outrage surrounding this video, he says that the Islam religion should look closer at what their religion really is, and maybe no be so quick to revolt against its claims. His first paragraph talks about how the leader of Hezbollah has called for a diversionary tactic, but “the world has been distracted by such diversion tactics once in 1979. It will not be fooled again in 2012.

I don’t see a relationship with this article and the censorship of the video, but the fact that this writer can blatantly call the leaders of a world power, and that world power’s enemy, hypocrites online, kind of makes me think about censorship. This article, although not offensive like the video, it calls out the leaders of Islam, as well as leaders in our country, like Hillary Clinton. It talks about a case where an Islam American was jailed for speaking out against the government. If this man is an american citizen, then why does he get jailed for exercising his first amendment rights. If I had done the same thing, I can almost guarantee I wouldn’t have been jailed for assisting Al Qaeda. I guess it just shocks me that our country can be as hypocritical as this and not be honest with ourselves about it.

Freedom of Speech: In the News

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/08/14/lawyer-vows-to-appeal-runling-that-facebook-like-is-not-free-speech/

This article intrigues me. It’s a new form of an issue, the online world being what it is. Through this article, a man claims that a “like” on facebook isn’t a right under the constitution, because it’s not speech. But, what is it? Past liking things, what are people allowed to say on the internet? Laws have been passed in many states across the country against cyber-bullying, but there are many left that haven’t passed anything regarding to the online world at all. This is a gray area for the world and I believe it’s a big issue our country needs to sort out, our technology isn’t getting any slower.

September 17th, Tinker vs Demoines

Agreeing or disagreeing with this statement is a hard thing to decide on, this is the gray area. Any given school is going to have different rules, and although freedom of speech is a right, should someone be able to wear a shirt with beer cans on it? It’s hard enough defining a gray area in the first place, let alone agreeing. However, I do think that if a shirt portrays something illegal or has hate speech, it should not be allowed. But here comes another problem, what is considered hate-speech? This gray area is so hard to define. Schools should be able to control it to a point where no one is offended, as long as people who are expressing their opinions do it in a respectable way. Although this is a gray area, student safety should come first, but physical safety isn’t always number one. I’m going in circles because I don’t know what I think.

The first example, that I’m sure everyone is thinking, is the Sydney Spies yearbook photo drama. Should the school have been able to not print her photo? It is a school yearbook, and she was out of dress-code, but does that give the school the right to take away her personal freedom of expressing her desires to be a model? What if she would have been in dress-code, but been in a bar? This gray area thing is driving me crazy. Another example that comes to mind is a persons right to own a gun. Can someone who’s 18 have a gun in school? If they are allowed to own it, and their personal rights say they can have a gun, why can’t they at a public school? It all comes down to the safety of the general public and weather or not what’s happening is a threat to that.

September 12th, The PATRIOT ACT

Prompt: Sometimes personal rights must be given up un order to protect us from those who could be a danger to all of us.

The key word in the prompt is sometimes. To keep the whole of our country safe, someones rights are going to have to be given up and taken eventually. However, you have to have a balance, and realize that from whom you take the rights must be the person that is a threat, or you need to take away as little rights as possible. If somebody is a danger to the people, they should be forced to give up the rights to own a gun, or the rights to not be searched at random. But, not everybody should be able to have their rights taken away. Me, for example. The only thing I’ve ever done is download illegal music, and it kind of freaks me out that the government can listen to my phone or come into my house without me knowing it. 

According to the PATRIOT ACT, the FBI can search anything they want, anytime they want, weather it be with probable cause or not. I’ve only seen one side of the argument, and although I think I understand both sides, I don’t think the PATRIOT ACT is a very fair deal. What if the government is wasting their time following my Justin Bieber downloads when a real terrorist might live right up the street from me? I am struggling to wrap my head around all this, but my very basic opinion is that being able to search anything they want is wrong.

President Obama's DNR Speech

       Barack Obama is one of the most inspirational public speakers I have ever seen. In my opinion, he is leagues better than Mitt Romney. When he speaks, even if he’s spewing out empty rhetoric about sparkling spring days and the shadows over a shuddered steel mill, or if you don’t agree with what he’s saying, you can’t help but listen and get engrossed in it. At one point in his speech in the Democratic National Convention, he quotes President Lincoln, and the crowd screams, the camera cuts to people crying, and you feel a rush of patriotism in your heart, and you forget that he isn’t actually saying something about what he’ll do for his country. At another point in his speech, he appeals to the hope of the people, saying it was us who changed the country, us who helped make education more affordable, made more jobs for the people, and who made the truth something accessible for the United States. Whoever his speech writers are, they do a good job, and his delivery is always something to be remembered.

Although I was thoroughly impressed by his speech, he didn’t even mention one of my main issues about this election, women's health. On his website, he has a long list of facts about money and insurance and saving money, written for people to understand, and I was hoping that in his speech he would touch on the facts and his actual plan to help women with their rights, and I was disappointed when he didn’t. On his website, I learned that 98% of Catholic women have used birth control. I know I’m no math wiz, but 98% is a lot of people. So my question is, how can we be arguing this issue at all when women make up 51% of our country? 

Michelle Obama's Speech: Power and Corruption

       “I have seen firsthand that becoming president doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.” This, to me, signifies Obamas presidency in a sentence. As a president, you have power. Although you don’t have all the power of our country, you can still make big decisions for our country. She states in her speech that even though her husband has power, it doesn’t change him. I connect to this part a lot, because when I have power I’m one of those people who abuses it. Maybe not abuse it, but I am for sure a boss more than a leader. In this speech, it shows that even if someone has a lot of power, they don’t have to abuse it. I admire Obama and his use of the power that he has, and for realizing that even with that power, he doesn’t have to change who he is.

Another part that makes me think in her speech is when she talks about how she was worried for her girls. After watching The Campaign this weekend, seeing her say that our president still cares about her children and her the same way is admirable. In The Campaign, drama ensues and the families are broken apart, as in many movies where the hero or heroin is given power. The fact that this doesn’t happen in real life is inspiring and makes me feel a lot better about our political system. Power doesn’t always mean corruption, and our president is a pretty good example of this.