The Ultimate 'Right' Today? The Right to be Offensive!

March 23, 2007

Vanity license plates, body piercings, too loose or too tight clothing, smoking cigarettes, Confederate or Mexican flags, tattoos, obscenity and vulgarity on radio and TV, religious rituals and taboos...the list

goes on and on. Let me add one: strong perfumes in the church pews.

All have been mentioned recently in the newspaper by people who have felt "offended."

But what we're seeing is the ultimate turnaround in Political Correctness. After almost 40 years of walking on eggshells politically and watching what we say about virtually any subject, the essence of American society in the 21st century has finally evolved into "The Right to be Offensive."

Our nation's founders certainly wanted to protect the right of citizens to disagree and to be "different."The Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment, after 200 years of judicial review, have been stretched from basic freedoms of speech, assembly, press and government petition into whatever you want them to be today.

Ironically, the freedoms which were first sown in the U.S. Constitution came to us from people who often disliked each other rather intensely. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had vastly different ideas of what

that Constitution should be. They fought each other vigorously, on principles, in the court of public opinion, but they were civil enough to compromise in the end. They were united only by their fear of tyranny, possibly the rise of another King George III.

Today, we seem to have lost this civility in our discussions of public policy. We just shout at each other--verbally or symbolically--and, often, that is offensive. So now, we have the ultimate of all

fundamental liberties.

Even in the course of being different, disagreeable or even offensive, we do need to remember that one factor trumps all those civil liberties. The courts have held consistently, and over many years, that individual rights can be curtailed any time "the public safety" is threatened.

So we have to learn to tell the difference between being "offended" and being "endangered." If our actions put others at risk of personal harm, then we have no right to pornography, no right to be ornery and certainly no right to bear arms.