You can't say that!

By Capt. Fogg

CNN will spend the afternoon surveying the career of Don Imus, says the talking head while people are being blown up in Iraq. I've just been watching the Rutgers women's impassioned self pity over how their magic moment has been stolen. All as if nothing else were going on. As if Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News and Jerry Fallwell and a host of comedians, congressmen and religious leaders are not making careers out of disparaging people for their ethnicity and beliefs and opinions. No one calls a news conference when Dave Chappelle says he's tired of having his racist comments edited. No one has suggested that Mel Gibson should be "banned" from making movies or talking about them in public and I imagine the millions that some entertainers are making by calling women bitches and whores, nappy headed and otherwise, aren't coming from white racists. I'm not calling for the burning of the Gospel of John even though it insults me and my ethnicity and I'm not anxious to live in any place where people get to ban speech just because it isn't reverential enough or is actually insulting toward women, minorities, basketball players or other people.

Face it, it's time to be women and not little girls whining to mommy. You won some games and that doesn't make you special or worthy of my admiration or give you special protection against being insulted. If you think your "moment" was taken away because somebody made a bad joke or called you a name, then your moment wasn't worth much anyway; certainly not enough to make a slur into slander. Sooner or later you will have to leave the nanny state and face a world that some college administration can't control. People say stupid and ugly things and sometimes they get ambassadorships for it. People tell lies and get millions killed. I'm a bit less concerned about the fragile self esteem of young women who think basketball and their ephemeral achievements are more important than the First Amendment.

If one really wants to call, as the Rutgers women's basketball team is doing today, for the lifetime ban of Don Imus from public commentary, one has to ask who in a free country has the authority to do it. Certainly the US Government is denied that power and for good reason. If any self appointed guardians of propriety think they can claim the right to regulate public dialog or to ban anything and everything they found offensive and without regard to law and liberty, they will succeed, as much as I dislike Imus and hate racism, only over my dead body.