For the record, I have no idea who let the dogs out. I didn't even know the gate was open.
We Americans get hooked on saying some pretty silly things, you know? "Where's the beef?" "Whoot! There it is!" "Make my day."
Pretty harmless stuff, generally. Granted, after the 15th time someone avows that he feels your pain, you're probably ready to inflict some of your own. But overall, yeah pretty harmless.
There is, however, one expression that never fails to make me nuts. Truth be told, it's less a catch phrase than a cop-out, a meaningless thing people say usually when accusations of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism or homophobia have been leveled and they're being asked to defend the indefensible.
"Entitled to my opinion," they say. Or "entitled to his opinion." The sense of it is the same even when the words vary: People clamber atop the First Amendment and remind us that it allows them or someone they decline to criticize to say or believe whatever they wish.
It happened again just last week, on the eve of the Grammys. One of the entertainment news programs did an informal poll of musicians, asking them to comment on the rapper Eminem's homophobic and misogynistic music. You'd have sworn they were all reading from the same script:
"He's entitled to say what he feels," they said. In that, they echoed the folks who thought John Rocker was unfairly maligned for his bigotry: "He's entitled to his opinion," the ballplayer's defenders told us. And that, in turn, was an echo of what happened in 1993 when a reporter asked a student at City University of New York about Dr. Leonard Jeffries' claim of a Jewish conspiracy against black people. "He had a right to say whatever he chooses to say," the student replied.
Like I said: It makes me crazy.
Not because the observation isn't correct. Rather, because it is beside the point.
Anybody who's a more ardent supporter of the First Amendment than I am probably ought to be on medication. I believe the liberties it grants are meaningless unless extended as far as possible into the ideological hinterlands. Only in this way can you preserve and defend those liberties for the rest of us. So as far as I'm concerned, every sexist, homophobe, communist, flag-burner, Jew-baiter, Arab-hater and racist must be protected in the peaceful expression of his or her beliefs.
But after acknowledging the right of the hateful to be hateful and the vile to be vile, it seems to me that the least I can do is use my own right of free speech to call those people what they are. It seems to me, in fact, that I have a moral obligation to do so. But many people embrace moral cowardice instead and blame it on the First Amendment.
It's a specious claim. The First is violated when the government seeks to censor expression. That didn't happen to Eminem. Didn't happen to John Rocker, either. What did happen was that media and private citizens criticized them and demanded that some price public condemnation, professional demotion be extracted as penalty for the stupid things they said.
Friends and neighbors, that's not a violation of free speech. That IS free speech. And if some folks confuse the issue, well, that's because too many of us believe freedom of speech means freedom from censure, the unfettered right to say whatever you please without anyone being allowed to complain. Worse, many of us accept that stricture for fear of seeming "judgmental." These days, of course, "judgmental" is a four-letter word.
I make no brief for being closed-minded. People ought to open themselves to the widest possible variety of ideas and expressions. But that doesn't mean losing your ability to discern or abdicating your responsibility to question, criticize ... THINK. All ideas are not created equal. To pretend otherwise is to create a rush from judgment to free a bigot from taking responsibility for his beliefs, and allow him a facade of moral validity to hide behind.
So I could happily live the rest of my life without being reminded that this fool or that has the right to say what he thinks. Sure he does. But you know what? We all do.
Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.
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