Imus Firing Is a Set Back for Free Speech
By Christopher M. Finan

Few people will shed tears over the firing of Don Imus-and that's a problem.

It isn't easy to see the implications for free speech in the dispatching of a man who has made remarks that while merely stupid to some are odious to many.

Yet the punishment of Imus is a backward step for a country that has demonstrated a growing tolerance for offensive ideas over the last 80 years. Our law has come to embody the view that government must never punish a person for his or her opinions, no matter how heinous.

In 1919, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. gave eloquent expression to this idea in a case involving several radicals who had been arrested for distributing a pamphlet. Ignoring the pleas of his wife and fellow justices, the 78-year-old Holmes called for the release of the radicals, declaring that "the ultimate good desired is better reached by a free trade in ideas-that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market."

In the years since Holmes' opinion in the case of Abrams v. U.S., the United States government has given up most of its censoring ways, extending protection to political and artistic speech that is deeply offensive to many Americans. The Supreme Court has even protected the right of the Ku Klux Klan to burn crosses.

How, then, can Don Imus be punished? Lawyers will quickly point out that there is no government action here and that the purpose of the First Amendment is to protect individuals from government censorship.

It is Imus' employer, CBS, who has fired him, which is its right.

But this is too narrow a view of free speech. Holmes argued that free speech is essential to democracy. It is only when people feel free to express an idea that it becomes possible to debate it and determine if it is good or bad.

That is clearly not the view of the Rev. Al Sharpton and those who demanded the firing of Imus. "This has never been about Don Imus," Sharpton recently declared. "This is about the use of the public airwaves for bigoted, racist speech."

Yet the Imus controversy seems to demonstrate the point that Holmes was making. The racist words of a talk show host have brought to center stage a debate over the roles of race and sex in our society. It is a debate that might never have received so much attention if Imus had been forbidden to discuss these issues. Without Imus' remark, we would never have witnessed the moving response by the women of the Rutgers basketball team. His three foolish words have led the nation to reaffirm its commitment to equality.

One of the sad ironies in the Imus controversy is that it was a number of African Americans who took the lead in ousting the talk show host. While they celebrate victory over their enemy, the leaders of the anti-Imus campaign should remember that free speech played a key role in protecting a struggling civil rights movement during the 1960s. The Supreme Court used the First Amendment to overturn many laws passed by segregationist legislatures in an effort to frustrate protests organized by Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders.

One of the most important civil rights decisions came in the case of New York Times v. Sullivan when the Supreme Court overturned a libel judgment against the Times that would have severely limited press reporting of demonstrations in the South. "We consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open," Justice William J. Brennan Jr. declared.

The firing of Don Imus erodes our national commitment to free speech. We all lose when that happens.