Hate speech, yes; but God, no

The Boston Herald

May 21, 1993

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Let me see if I've got this straight: I live in a country in which it's perfectly OK for college professors speaking in classrooms or graduations or anywhere else they choose, to promote hate and racism; but where clergy are warned, when they take the podium at school events, that if they say the G word they're breaking the law.

No wonder this country is so messed up.

Here's the background: The U.S. Supreme Court last year ruled that prayers violate the constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state. This means that prayers can no longer be said at public school graduations.

School committees, running scared because they fear costly lawsuits, have interpreted this ruling to mean that all references to God are taboo.

"There are clearly areas where after the fact you can get into a debate about whether it {a reference to God} was religious or not," says John Roberts, director of the Boston chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

It's "after the fact" that cities and towns don't want to deal with. They don't have the money for a long, legal battle. They don't want to take on the ACLU or some listener for whom the word God is a red flag. So they've done the easy thing: they've stopped inviting clergy to say anything at graduations.

In the meantime, however, there is this story: Remember Professor Leonard Jeffries, the black bigot who was removed last year from his post as chairman of the black studies department at City College of New York for making anti-Semitic remarks? Remember how these comments were not the first he had ever spoken?

"If I had my way I'd wipe {white people} off the face of the earth," he once told a class.

Well, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, this kind of hateful, inflammatory and divisive speech is not only protected; it's rewarded. A federal jury ruled Monday that university officials, who publicly said they wanted to take action against Jeffries for his vile comments and who had him removed him as chairman of his department, had violated the professor's free speech rights. The jury then told these officials they had to pay Jeffries $400,000 in damages.

Nice country, America. Jeffries is free to stand before a crowd and accuse Jews of conspiring with the Mafia to make blacks look bad in films - a scheme "plotted and programmed out of Hollywood by people called Greenberg, Weisberg, Trigliani, and what not," were his exact words. But the university that pays his salary is not free to fire him.

This is what it has come to: Hatemongering is protected by free speech. Punitive action to stop the hatemongering is not. References to white "ice people" with their "homosexual warrior mentality" can be shouted from a school podium. Mention of God or a divine being must not even be whispered.

Isn't this discrimination? And isn't it abhorrent that school systems across the state and across the country are lying down and playing dead rather than challenging this situation?

The reason they're buckling is understandable. They don't have enough money to pay for supplies and teachers. They don't want to spend precious dollars on lawyers. But what about principle? What about teaching young people the importance of doing not the easy thing but the right thing?

Jeffries never lost his teaching job, for which he earns $70,110 a year. The only thing that happened to him was that he was relieved of his duties as chairman of the black studies department. Now he's $400,000 richer, far more well known than he ever was, and in a few weeks a judge, in all probability, will rule that he should be reinstated.

And on it will go - unless people react.

Unless the students in Jeffries' school walk out of the door, and the parents who pay for the students stop paying. Unless ordinary people begin to do more than quietly accept the unacceptable.

As far as clergy and talk of God: If every public school invited clergy to speak at this year's graduation ceremonies, and all the clergy mentioned God, maybe, just maybe there wouldn't be enough ACLU lawyers to go around.