| On August 6, subscription only Gongwer ran an article that included the following paragraph:
(Though ironically, on the blog, Ms. Barry has encouraged Cleary College in Livingston County to not invite conservative columnist Ann Coulter to speak at a college fundraiser.)
Since I have never involved myself in the Coulter - Cleary College situation, Gongwer has issued a correction on their website. However I want to take a minute to address the "ironically" part.
If a group of citizens want to pressure advertisers, sponsors, etc., to keep Ann Coulter from coming to their town, that's called a boycott. It's the free market at work.
If your government wants to single out one website for censorship because that website says "bad things" about it, that's a constitutional violation.
People who enjoy Ann Coulter's work think that it's "censorship" when someone asks that she not be a celebrity speaker in their home-town. But Ann Coulter uses words like "raghead" and "faggot" to describe people she doesn't like. She jokes about killing Presidents and Supreme Court Justices. It's not censorship to lobby or boycott the sponsors who are financially rewarding that kind of speech.
BFM does not call for people to be killed, nor do we use peoples' ethnicity as a means to disparage them, nor do we mock the death of a candidate's son.
Nor do we make $25,000 every time we open our mouths, or wear black cocktail dresses at 8am. We're just bloggers. Not celebrities who appeal to the lowest forms of life in our part of the political spectrum.
The censorship of BFM and the business with Coulter-Cleary, is a false equivalency on the part of Gongwer. I'm shocked that a news service cannot tell the difference between the two. |
