I was recently accused of advocating censorship when I suggested that college professors be mindful of the manners in which they present their political opinions. It seems that every time someone labeled “conservative” asks for someone to limit themselves (or, in rarer cases, asks for the government to limit someone), those who claim to be liberal immediately shout out “CENSORSHIP!”

First of all, it is interesting to note that those we currently label “conservative” can roughly be said to call for the limitation of social freedoms but the expansion of fiscal and economic freedoms, while those we label “liberal” are generally only concerned with social liberty. Of course, “liberals” constantly seek the limitation of various social freedoms as well – the right to bear arms, for instance. This discrepancy between purported belief and actual action, in and of itself, necessarily undermines our terminology of liberal and conservative, but I will use it nonetheless for lack of better words.

It is not my intention to determine whether or not any degree (or what degree) of censorship is good for a virtuous democracy. (If you are not interested in a virtuous society, you and I will probably be utterly unable to converse about politics). It is my belief that censorship should only be personally imposed. In a perfect world, there would be no law. Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world (we can discuss theodicy another time) and therefore people kill people, steal from people, rape people, and take the liberty to do all sorts of other abominable things to others. Anyone who says that government should not limit any freedoms cannot possibly believe in a legal system. The government limits our freedoms every day. The question, in contemporary America, is not whether freedoms will be limited but rather which freedoms will be limited and in what ways.

Simply put, it is my belief that if we censor ourselves, the government would not see a need (real or imagined) to limit any of our freedoms. To use an extreme example, murder is only illegal because people do in fact murder other people. If there had never been a murder anywhere on earth throughout all of human history, it seems unlikely that people would have ever even conceived of the possibility of murder and therefore would not have ever felt the need to institute a law against murder. I do not think there has ever been a political regime in all of human history that limited any freedom without some semblance of reason for doing so (however flawed). Governments limit “liberties” that they, for some reason or another, deem undesirable and even detrimental. This is not to say that I support legal censorship in any form, only to say that there has never been a government, to my knowledge, that has censored others randomly and haphazardly.

In the context of contemporary America, it is interesting that “liberals” only take issue with certain censorships. In fact, one might even go so far as to say that “liberals” are only concerned with eliminating the censorship of other “liberals”. For instance, prayer in public schools is technically illegal, and thus prayers at a public high school graduations and sporting events are at best highly regulated and at worst prohibited altogether. Do you hear any “liberals” shouting from the rooftops about how unjust this is? Also, there is a tax code, proposed by Senator Lyndon B. Johnson (he had not yet become president), which states that clergy cannot speak out about political issues from the pulpit if they want to keep their tax-exempt status (in particular, they cannot endorse a specific candidate or present a stance on a specific issue). Why do you not hear any “liberals” denouncing this tax code as censorship? Why do groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union instead use this tax code against churches which would promote the Republican platform? If the ACLU is about American Civil Liberties, as its name implies, why does it explicitly reject the liberty of a member of the clergy to say what he or she wants to say within the confines of his or her own church’s building? In contrast, why did the ACLU – or any other “liberal” organization for that matter – fail to at least frown upon Democratic candidates who used churches traditionally allied with the Democratic Party as a campaign platform as recently as the ongoing presidential election? Why have left-leaning churches been an acceptable campaign venue for the Democratic Party while mainstream churches have been threatened with legal action for merely asking a Republican politician to lead a completely apolitical prayer? Why is there a double standard on this issue? Do you think it has something to do with the fact that the only organizations interested in censoring this freedom are “liberal”? Since when are Democrats the only ones allowed to enjoy freedom of speech? My point here is simply to say that we can all see that censorship exists in this country. If it is going to exist at all, it should be unbiased.

I have never been a proponent of legal censorship. I will restate this at the risk of being overly redundant: It is my sincere belief that personal censorship could, at least in theory, eliminate the need for legal censorship altogether. I, for one, would rather choose to not do something than have the government tell me that I cannot do it; however, if someone wants to take issue with this belief of mine, let them first take issue with the actual legal censorship that exists in this country. Let them seek to allow people of all political persuasions – liberals and conservatives – to enjoy the same liberties.

Matt Brumit is a junior Humanities major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].