The United States’ has to be vigilant in protecting its unique Bill of Rights from dilution, degradation and manipulation. Once the threats came from the political right, as with the Red-baiting tactics of Sen. Joe McCarthy. Now it more typically comes from the kinder, gentler, more hypocritical political left, often in the form of threats to “hate speech,” a term that can mean pretty much whatever the kinder, gentler censor wants it to mean, and is especially handy to stifle dissent.

This First Amendment assault was on view yesterday on MSNBC, as PR loud mouth Donny Deutch, columnist Mike Barnicle and University of Pennsylvania professor Anthea Butler all agreed that the makers of the anti-Muslim video now being used as an excuse to attack embassies should be indicted. Uh, no. Making a movie cannot be a crime in the U.S.: this was what Citizens United was all about, and the principle is called “Freedom of Speech.” But bigger brains than Donny’s are trying to chip away at the right that makes America America, using the ever-popular “everybody does it” rationalization to argue that European nations prosecute those who “hurt religious feelings”, in the immortal words of our Cairo Embassy, so it must be the right thing to do.

Scared yet? If not read this post, and this, from the Volokh Conspiracy, on the arguments for limiting Free Speech being made by Prof. Peter Spiro and former Yale Dean Harold Koh, the latter now working in the Obama State Department.

Or just watch how much the bureaucrats in our nation’s capital respects the First Amendment. Or understand satire.

“Marion Berry’s Dirty Asian Summer Punch” was a recent addition to the fare at The Pug, a Washington, D.C. bar. The drink was a jab at the former mayor, current City Council member and around-the-clock rogue, scoff-law, ethics corrupter and embarrassment Marion Barry, who had declared that Asian shop owners and Filipino nurses were taking away the jobs from the people of his Ward that he cared about–blacks, natch. The sign in the bar advertising the punch might have been designed by Mickey Rooney, with a stereotype Asian caricature — bald, with slanted eyes and buck teeth, spouting a version of the punchline of an old racist vaudeville joke:  “No tickee, no punchee!” (By the way, does anyone know the rest of the joke? I’ve never been able to figure out what it is.)

D.C.’s  Office of Human Rights wrote a letter to the bar’s owner  calling the sign “racially offensive, ordering that it be removed and insisting that “Dirty Asian Summer Punch” be taken off the menu, writing, “We believe that such a sign is not demonstrative of the shared values and practices that make the District a fully inclusive environment for all residents and visitors.” The director of the agency is Gustavo F. Velasquez.

The agency claims that the drink and its sign violates the District’s Human Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion and (oh, god ahead, guess the rest), and includes a section that makes it illegal…

“…to print, circulate, post, or mail, or otherwise cause, directly or indirectly, to be published a statement, advertisement, or sign which indicates that the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of a place of public accommodation will be unlawfully refused, withheld from or denied an individual; or that an individual’s patronage of, or presence at, a place of public accommodation is objectionable, unwelcome, unacceptable, or undesirable.”

The Pug had 72 hours to remove the “Dirty Asian Summer Punch” sign to avoid a formal charge that could end in  a cease-and-desist order fines of up to $10,000. The owner, a jokester but not a crusader, said to hell with it, and took the sign down while changing the name of the drink to “Politically Correct Punch” —not really, but that’s what I would have done.

Thus a court, perhaps the U.S.Supreme Court, won’t have the pleasure of telling the D.C. government that it is stomping on Mr. Madison’s piece of paper. And, of course, the agency get away with censoring “hate speech,” except that it is really joke speech. The owner, Tony Tomelden, had an Irish father who admired Marion Barry, and Tomelden, who did not, invented the drink to mock Barry’s racism. It is unlikely that Asians are unwelcome in his bar, since his mother was Filipino. An old “Irish Need Not Apply” sign also hangs in the bar. The D.C. government doesn’t object to that.

What was done to Tomelden is state censorship, and is a harbinger of what the U.S. will be like if Deutch, Spiro, Koh, and other word and thought bullies on the Left get their way…and they might. Satire is especially endangered, if directed at the “wrong” people, or even the right ones. The willful misunderstanding of Tomelden’s admittedly hard allusion to anti-Asian bigotry is redolent of the still ongoing persecution of  lawyer Pat Rogers in New Mexico. 

There are too many among us that care more about feelings than freedom, and not surprisingly, a lot of them are too dumb and deadly serious to understand when someone is kidding. And the building threat to the First Amendment is nothing to laugh at.

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Facts and Graphic: Washington Post

Sources:

• RealClearPolitics
• Volokh 1
• Volokh 2

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.