First Amendment Rights

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence because his strength lay in his use of language to present powerful arguments, rather than in his political savvy.

He believed “freedom of speech cannot be limited without being lost.” Throughout written history it has been the writers, whether dramatic or journalistic, who have brought us diverse ideas from which we are able to choose our own believes.

In 2000, the A&E Channel’s Biography series choose the 1,000 most influential people of the last millennium. As the list narrowed to the final five, it became difficult to predict who might receive the number one slot because all the obvious candidates had already been chosen.

Someone whose name does easily flow off the tongue but whose influence on our modern society cannot be denied claimed the top position. Johannes Gutenberg was a simple German simple workingman trying to make his job easier when he invented the printing press in 1450. From that time forward the greatest ideas of the millennium and beyond came to be known by the masses. Without the means of the printing press, the ideas of the greatest inventions and ideas would not be known to man. What type of world would we be without the literature, political treatises, the varied religious documents, and poetry?

These ideas, diverse and prolific, provide us with the basis from which to form our own opinions and to create our own art, whether it be poetry, painting, sculpture, or religious or political tracts. And it is the writer who puts those words on paper to express the art of language. Writers have long been the first and last vestiges of Thomas Jefferson’s plea to resist censorship in any of its guises.

That is why I have been so concerned about an organization to which I have belonged for the past three years. The Florida’s Writers Association has as its motto, “Writers supporting writers” and has provided me with many opportunities to expand my base as a writer across the state. Recently, the political winds of censorship permeated the core of this group who should stand above all others in zealous protection of freedom of speech.

At the annual convention in November, a film was shown that had been produced by FWA’s president. Caryn Suarez had solicited photos and videos from its memberships to provide a year in review for the organization. Last year’s first place unpublished poetry winner, Henry Burt Stevens, submitted a video-reading of his Royal Palm Award poem, “Victory.” Suarez chose to lead the film with this artistic reading.

I could justify the placement of this poem in the video and offer my own interpretation of certain lines that caused a great stirring of controversy, but I will not. I will not because it does not matter what the poem means because it is one man’s offering on a topic, and it is his freedom of expression. It was Suarez’s freedom of choice that put it on the film.

The protests began before the film even finished at the convention. Suarez was banned by the rest of the board of FWA from selling the DVD, which she and her husband had produced at their own expense. Suarez was hounded and threatened with lawsuits from writers across the state. But the controversy started even earlier when the board met at the beginning of the conference and a member put a motion on the floor that would block any member who wrote “political” material from becoming a member of FWA.

My first reaction to that news was to kick that person off the board, but by censoring that person’s opinion I would also be participating in what Jefferson would call the loss of freedom of speech. I am grateful that the motion did not pass and cooler heads prevailed.

However, the controversy still continues with FWA as a new president is being selected for the new year. One FWA member wrote an email to the general membership chat board, which crystallizes everything for me. This person vehemently opposed the showing of the poem at the convention because this writer disagreed with the content of the poem. I did too, but I will fight to the end for that person’s right to express himself. I have the option to write my own poetry expressing my own opinion. However, my colleague who shares my opinion of the poem believes that if the poem must be explained and cannot stand alone then it should be relegated to a specific, narrow audience.

The email asked the candidates for FWA president to take a stand. And guess what? This writer had the stand all laid out for them. If the candidate would show courage and state “what is shown to the membership at large must be reviewed by a committee of peers,” then this writer, a member of the Florida Writer’s Association would support that candidate.

I would remind this writer that this very policy began one of the Hitler’s first actions in creating the Aryan state. His committee of peers began censoring books in Nazi Germany and even went so far as to burn piles of books that did not fit with the government’s narrow definitions of acceptable expression.

Perhaps this attitude is not so surprising in a country founded on the principles of freedom of expression and that now has “free speech zones” wherever the President is going to appear. In Pittsburgh Bill Neel was arrested for refusing to go into the “free speech zone” before President Bush’s appearance in 2002. He told the press, “As far as I’m concerned the whole country is a free speech zone.”

Apparently not anymore.

Defenders of the First Amendment must protect all of our rights of expression and remember that a difference of opinion only makes us stronger.

John F. Kennedy said in 1963, “When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.”

And writers above all others must stand tall in defense of tolerance of expression of all opinions or we are doomed to become one voice, one opinion, one life — bland and milk toast copies of whatever the party or religion in power deems us to be. And when that becomes the norm, the all the work of Gutenberg and all the writings of Jefferson will have been in vain.