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Free Speech, Hate Speech, Tweet Speech, Truth and Lies

Free Speech, Hate Speech, Tweet Speech, Truth and Lies

Last updated on: June 7, 2017 at 5:38 pm by Nancy Rockwell

Free Speech, Hate Speech, Tweet Speech, Truth and Lies 2017-06-07T17:38:26-04:00 Nancy Rockwell

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Our Miserable Public Conversation

If it is written down, it’s called “libel” whereas if it’s spoken, it’s called “slander.” Libel and slander are both forbidden forms of speech, within the terms of defamation law in these United States.

And, according to the Free Speech Primer at legalzoom.com, Defamation Law attempts to balance the freedom of speech and open exchange of ideas that are our Constitutionally given rights, without giving someone permission to run around spreading lies about you that may harm your reputation, ability to earn a living, etc.

So.

You’ve heard this next bit on the news, and here, quoted from the Harvard Crimson, a campus paper, it is in more detail:

“Harvard College rescinded admissions offers to at least ten prospective members of the Class of 2021 after the students traded sexually explicit memes and messages that sometimes targeted minority groups in a private Facebook group chat.

A handful of admitted students formed the messaging group—titled, at one point, “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens”—on Facebook in late December, according to two incoming freshmen.

In the group, students sent each other memes and other images mocking sexual assault, the Holocaust, and the deaths of children, according to screenshots of the chat obtained by The Crimson. Some of the messages joked that abusing children was sexually arousing, while others had punchlines directed at specific ethnic or racial groups. One called the hypothetical hanging of a Mexican child “piñata time.”

After discovering the existence and contents of the chat, Harvard administrators revoked admissions offers to at least ten participants in mid-April, according to several members of the group. “

And the howls about free speech have arisen. They likely will not come to much, as Harvard is a private university, and it has always, in writing, “ . . . reserved the right to withdraw an offer of admission under various conditions including if an admitted student engages in behavior that brings into question his or her honesty, maturity, or moral character.”

I happen to concur whole-heartedly with the administration of Harvard on this decision. Harvard has the right and the responsibility to try to produce adults who can lead and shape the ethos of the nation, and to try not to produce insensitive boors. Doubtless, some insensitive boors will graduate anyway, boorishness is a hard weed to be rid of.

And our dilemma is, we have one now in the Oval Office. An insensitive (unless the joke is aimed at him) boor, not a Harvard grad but a man educated enough and smart enough to use Twitter to communicate with the public. He has more Twitter followers than all the newspapers in the US have readers, so his is a creditable innovation in governmental communication and a sad reality in a President.

Sad. That is one of Trump’s favorite tweet words, and it can be said of his tweets.

Nearly all his Tweets are offensive, in one way or another. Some are vulgar. Some are insulting to named individuals, like the Mayor of London. Some are insulting to the nation’s allies. And many, if not most, are false. It is clear he doesn’t care about that. There’s never a Tweet that begins*, Oops. My mistake . . .*

This Presidential habit has unmuzzled hate speakers in our culture, to a fairly alarming degree. Not that they haven’t been there, but a kind of cultural lid had been placed over them, a lid that became a cultural wall.

And Donald Trump became a voice for them, a voice with a megaphone we all have to hear. His ongoing tweet speech gives them the courage to shout hate and graffiti hate, to grab young women by the crotch and to pull headscarves off Muslim women.

Trump has also unmuzzled a proliferation of leakers. And he hates that, vows to put leakers in jail, on the basis of their crimes. There have always been leakers in the White House, but now there are more, and they are painting the picture of Trump’s tantrums and instability.

As well, there is an elaborate speech-dance that goes on between elected and appointed political officials, about what can and cannot be said, about the questions that can and cannot be answered. Subpoenas are becoming the order of the day. This is verbal chess, with commentaries by leakers.

For Christians, the speech issue is engaged by the Day of Pentecost, and the long season of the church year that it unfolds.

The teaching of Pentecost is that speech is a gift that offers understanding and a vision of hope. Around the world, when people are understood, and have hope, they respond in joy. Pentecost inaugurated our global citizenship as faithful living, and modelled speaking hopefully, freely, lovingly, as Peter did to the multitude that day.

The President engages in almost no Christian speaking – ever. He is quick to insult and condemn, also to brag, and insists that his plans are for our good even when evidence of great harm is put forward by the Office of the Budget. None of his mega-church pastor-friends ever seem take him on about his speaking and tweeting.

And so now America is caught in patterns of public speaking that do not hold out a vision of good life or great national behavior. We, the people, are left weeping about the bills that, thankfully, do not seem to be moving toward passage, at least not now.

Our Senators and Representatives ask us to join them in protesting these outrages, and our allies declare that there is no longer hope for them in us.

None of the speech that has been in the headlines of late is faithful to Jesus – there is neither mercy nor forbearance, no love for enemies and no turning of the other cheek. Nor is any of this is the kind of talk that is faithful to being human.

As we await the speaking of fired FBI Director James Comey tomorrow, we are still waiting for truth to be spoken. A wiser President might spend the evening praying in the National Cathedral, or with his devout daughter and son-in-law, in the Oval Office.

Instead, the news is full of leaked stories of his outrage, and of his plotting to tweet during the Comey testimony.

Perhaps the students who were elated at the thought of being best buddies in hate speech and gross out pictures at Harvard are the natural result of the conversation in our culture, where a man was able to get elected after being caught on tape being a crude braggart about women.

We know whose heads are not inspired by Pentecostal flames of hope. We know whose mouths do not speak the language of faith.

It’s going to take a while to relearn the vision we all seem to have lost, the vision in which old and young, men and women, from every nation and every religion, can be transformed by the presence of holy speaking.
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