It was a tiny story on page 28, but “Huck Finn may offend; School cancels play” (Oct. 21) was an important piece of news:
It should reassure your readers that free speech continues to sink into a great intellectual landfill in this country.
In yet another frightening example of the triumph of the right-not-to-be-offended, a Milwaukee high school recently canceled a production of a stage rendition of “Huckleberry Finn.”
The high school had “reviewed” the script and decided “the play was not appropriate for 1993.” Let’s hear it for the bureaucratic gall to judge an artistic work, and the expanding freedom to be immune from offensive utterances.
Apparently our society is forgetting its civics lessons, or we have stopped caring. The notion of free speech, as George Orwell put it, is the right to speak things most people do not want to hear.
The lone voice is supposed to be protected under law from the tyranny of greater numbers who find the speech offensive, but increasingly the biggest bully is government, acting under color of law.
Great power resides in this bully, and one day soon, at this rate, we’ll wake up with no 1st Amendment. Its original writing will still be attractively presented to awed throngs at the National Archives, but it will, in reality, lie in a casket at Arlington Cemetery.
This reader wonders who will attend the wake-the American Civil Liberties Union? The Milwaukee High School? The offended parents who pressured the censorship?
