words will never hurt me
you remember the old children’s parable
it has a nice ring to it but it’s not
really accurate is it words can actually
be quite hurtful I know I’ve been hurt
by them can you hear me is there okay I
give you some echo I’m sorry I know I’ve
been hurt by words and in fact there was
a moment here on this campus when I was
very much hurt by words fifteen years
ago I was a bright-eyed bushy-tailed
freshman here at Yale University when a
group of students invited the late
amiri baraka to come speak at Yale now
Baraka was a famous playwright but he
had become rather notorious in his later
years because he had written a poem
about 9/11 entitled somebody blew up
America in which he claimed that the
Prime Minister of Israel had somehow
told 4000 Israelis in New York not to
show up for work that day at the Twin
Towers
now this accusation that the Jewish
state somehow had some sort of
foreknowledge about the worst terrorist
attack on American soil and had
furthermore withheld that information
from the world in order to provoke some
sort of civilizational war in the Middle
East was a pretty clear-cut case of
conspiratorial anti-semitism now
naturally many people were upset by the
decision to host Baraka here at Yale not
least the Jewish community and as a 19
year old Jewish freshman from the
suburbs of Boston whose only real
experience of anti-semitism had maybe
been some teasing and an elementary
school for not celebrating Christmas I
wasn’t really prepared to deal with a
moment like this was someone like this
being invited to campus now in
retrospect reflecting on how often
campus speakers on at colleges and
universities are protested by students
or their talks are completely shut down
I could have stood up in the middle of
this event and started screaming that
Baraka was a hater and an anti-semite
and that
he was invading my safe space I could
have gotten front of the Dean who
invited him and screamed at her and said
that you know she should resign and lose
her job but what I did instead was as a
budding columnist for the heal Daily
News I went to the event and I at in the
back of the room and I respectfully took
notes on what he had to say and when
Baraka made his claim that Israel
somehow knew about 9/11 and didn’t tell
anyone I got up and asked him if he had
any sources for this information he
looked at me and said I had constipation
of the face and required a brain enema
which was a little hurtful particularly
when all the students in the room
laughed at me and gave him a standing
ovation afterwards I went home back to
my dorm and I wrote a column for the
Yale Daily News and I said that this was
one of the most disturbing events in my
life now I look back on this event
because it played a major role in my
maturation from a teenager into an adult
in my experience at Yale of confronting
very difficult ideas and vexing personal
situations has informed the way that I
look at the debates that are raging
across this country and indeed the world
about freedom of speech freedom of
speech is the most important right that
we have as citizens in a liberal society
it is the freedom the rights upon which
all other freedoms are contingent and we
are incredibly lucky to live in a
country where we have something called
the First Amendment the founders
understood how important free speech was
to maintaining a liberal free and
democratic society that they enshrined
it as the First Amendment in our
constitution and it’s actually quite
rare to live in a society that protects
freedom of speech so strongly as the
United States according to Freedom House
which is a global Human Rights monitor
only 13% of the world’s population live
in countries that protect freedom of
speech
now I’m often asked as a Jewish person
in a gay man how can you support the
rights of bigots and homophobes and
anti-semites to spew their hatred in
their bigotry to which I respond it is
precisely because I’m these things that
I think we have to defend the rights of
everyone equally to be able to have free
speech now unfortunately a lot of people
in my generation I’m on the later side
of the Millennial scale a lot of people
in my millennial generation don’t really
seem to understand this concept or don’t
agree with it according to a recent poll
Commission commissioned by the Pew
Research Center 40% of Millennials
believe that the government should be
able to ban statements that are
offensive to minority groups and it’s
not just Millennials on the other side
of the political spectrum goaded by a
president who attacks the news outlets
that he doesn’t like as fake news and
who threatens to use the libel laws to
bank corrupt publications that are
critical about him 45% 45% of
Republicans today believe that the
government should have the right to shut
down media outlets that are inaccurate
or biased a problem that we see what I
really actually want to talk about today
though is the issue of free speech on
campus because it’s there where the
future generations are being taught and
it’s there where frankly it seems not a
day goes by that there isn’t some sort
of controversy erupting about freedom of
speech of campus speakers being shouted
down of commencement speakers being
disinvited and a crucial concept that
seems to be embraced by many people
today is that words equal violence well
words are not sticks and stones they may
cause you distress as they certainly
have me in the past and frankly every
day I hear words that cause me distress
but they’re not going to break your
bones
and what’s rather ironic about this is
that often the people who make this
claim that words equal violence are the
ones who actually use real violence
to shut down the speech of people with
whom they disagree
last year the University of California
at Berkeley had to spend six hundred
thousand dollars on security to protect
a speaker coming to campus from a
rampaging mob now Yale unfortunately has
not been immune to this intellectual
discourse of censorship a couple days
before Halloween in 2015 the Yale
intercultural Affairs Council sent an
email to the entire undergraduate
student body and we should ask students
not to wear costumes that quote threaten
our sense of community through the
process of cultural appropriation it
then sent a helpful list of costumes to
avoid such as this one now reading this
email you would have thought that Yale
was awash with students just running
around in racist offensive Halloween
costumes but it actually wasn’t and the
problem with this email is that it
really assumed the worst of Yale
students it assumed that they were just
waiting for this you know pagan
Bacchanalia holiday to dress up in
blackface or giant tacos now feeling
understandably somewhat patronized by
this email many students wrote to Nicola
and Erica Christakis the master and
associate master respectively of
silliman college in Erica wrote an email
back to her students to the silliman
community and she said I wonder if we
should reflect more transparently as a
community on the consequences of an
institution which is to say bureaucratic
and administrative exercise of implied
control over college students have we
lost faith in young people’s capacity in
your capacity to exercise self censure
through social norming and also in your
capacity to ignore or reject things that
trouble you seems perfectly reasonable
to me
if you’re walking down the street and
you see someone wearing a costume that
you don’t like you can go up to them and
perhaps explain to them why you find
their costume offensive or you can just
look the other way well that’s when all
hell broke loose 700 students faculty
and alumni signed an open letter
denouncing Nicola and Erica Christakis
the following day a group of students
confronted Nikolas in the quad of
silliman College where they berated him
over the course of several hours
screaming in his face demanding that he
apologized for the thought crimes of his
wife and then later a group of students
presented a list of demands to the
president of Yale College insisting that
Nicola and Erica be fired a common
thread in these arguments in favor of
censorship is that censorship helps the
victims of discrimination in 2015 a
group of terrorists burst into the Paris
office of Charlie Hebdo a satirical
newspaper which had published a handful
of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in
shortly afterwards
Gary Trudeau who’s one of the most
famous American cartoonists and a Yale
grad by the way he was accepting a
Lifetime Achievement Award and he gave a
speech about Charlie Hebdo and
surprisingly he didn’t stand with his
murdered colleagues he actually made
excuses for the people who killed them
by punching downward by attacking a
powerless disenfranchised minority with
crude vulgar drawings closer to graffiti
than cartoons Charlie wandered into the
realm of hate speech Gary Trudeau said
those of us who defend the right of a
newspaper to mock a religion he said had
surrendered to our own kind of
fanaticism
so in Gary Trudeau is logic it was the
men who burst into a newspaper office
and killed 11 people because of cartoons
they didn’t like those people were
apparently powerless and it was the
people who were murdered for drawing
those cartoons who were the fanatics I
have to say if the men and women who
were murdered by terrorists for drawing
cartoons were alive to hear this excuse
for their murder they would probably be
surprised that it was they and not the
men who killed them who were being
accused of punching downwards now
perhaps you recognize this man over here
Fred Phelps he used to lead a a church
called the Westboro Baptist Church and
he would stand outside the funerals of
gay men who died of AIDS with these
lovely signs in 2004 before he died in
2014 the British government banned Fred
Phelps from stepping foot on its
territory because they were accusing him
of hate speech now I’m obviously very
offended by what Fred Phelps had to say
about gays about Jews pretty much about
everything and I’m sure most of us are
as well he’s a he was a pretty offensive
guy that’s kind of what he specialized
in but I can’t think of a worse way to
combat the real evil bigotry of a man
like Fred Phelps than by banning him
from saying what he wants to say and in
fact doing so betrays a fundamental
precept of the very movement that has
won equality for LGBT people in this
country which is that living in a free
society you should be able to have the
right to say to love who you want as
long as that does not impinge upon the
freedom of other people and that’s
because freedom is an expansive concept
it includes not just the right to marry
someone of the same gender
but also to say
and write your ideas and sometimes those
ideas are going to be offensive to
people but you don’t have a right to not
be offended
the problem with censorship is that once
you accept a little bit of it
it’s very very difficult to prevent a
lot let’s take the example of Russia
where five years ago the government they
are passed a law banning the propaganda
promoting non-traditional sexual
relationships to minors now this law
basically makes it illegal to say
anything remotely positive about gay
people or same-sex relationships and
shortly after this law was passed a 24
year old man was arrested simply for
holding up a sign that said support the
gays and lesbians of Russia down with
the fascists and homophobes now clearly
while the one of the reasons this law
was passed was to distract the Russian
people from their problem isn’t to
target a vulnerable
minority but there was really a deeper
ulterior motive behind this law this law
if you read about it is always mentioned
in the media as being an anti-gay or a
homophobic law but you actually read the
text of the law itself the words gay or
homosexual don’t appear once in the text
so ultimately what this law is really
about it’s about prohibiting a certain
type of speech and then it affects
everyone in Russia not just the gay
people but straight people as well
and the reason that the Russian
government did this and the reason why
it should concern those of us who
believe in freedom is that if the
Russian government can ban certain types
of positive references about
homosexuality today what’s to stop it
from banning negative comments in
negative speech about Vladimir Putin or
the Russian government tomorrow because
it’s this ultimately what frightens
Vladimir Putin most it’s not gay people
it’s not the moral degradation of
Russian society if he really cared about
the moral degradation of Russian society
surely he’d be doing something to combat
the rampant alcohol
the unwanted pregnancies the
transmission of sexually transmitted
diseases he’d be doing all sorts of
things to combat those problems but he’s
not because he knows that a society
where people are able to speak freely
free of the soviet-era fear that what
they say could land them in jail or find
a society where people are able to speak
freely is a society where his power is
challenged and so what does he do he
chips away bit by bit little by little
on the freedom of the Russian people to
speak their minds and have a debate and
have a conversation freedom of speech
was ultimately the tool that all civil
rights movements in America used to gain
their equality from the african-american
civil rights movement to the women’s
movement to the gay rights movement it
wasn’t so long ago that gay people
couldn’t even meet in a bar without
worrying that the police might just
randomly show up assault the patrons and
cart them off to jail gay publications
were confiscated in the u.s. mail and
their publishers were brought to court
for transmitting obscenity so gay rights
pioneers to fight this what did they do
they organized they marched they wrote
newspaper articles they used the First
Amendment they used their freedom of
speech this is a photo taken in 1965 of
the first gay rights protest in the
United States and it took place across
the street from the White House 1965
imagine how incredibly brave those men
and women were they were almost
universally seen by American society as
being sick and depraved but what changed
over the next 50 years they used their
freedom of speech to convince people
that they were right and that they
weren’t subhuman that they were just
like other people a couple of years ago
a pair of gay businessmen they hosted a
fireside chat with Texas senator Ted
Cruz
who’s a pretty vocal opponent of gay
marriage when news of this meeting went
public there were calls for massive
protests of the two gay businessmen of
their businesses people on Facebook
called them cockroaches and compared
them to Nazi collaborators simply
ultimately they apologized because they
were fearful that their businesses would
take a hit and what was so discouraging
about this was that a group of gay
people were attacking another group of
gay people simply for having a
conversation
it’s as if they forgot the entire
history of the gay rights movement which
was based upon convincing people who
disagreed to change their minds gay
people ultimately won the arguments
because they decided to have one it was
people like Frank Kameny
who in 1957 was a was fired from his job
in the Army map service because he was
gay and what did he do 16 years later he
successfully campaigned to get the
American Psychiatric Association to
remove homosexuality from his list of
mental disorders the Kemeny had very
little power compared to an established
institution like the American
Psychiatric Association and he won his
battle not by limiting the free speech
rights of those with whom he disagreed
but by fully embracing his own freedom
of speech is the lifeblood of democracy
and being able to argue with people
respectfully even if they have awful
hateful repulsive ideas is what
distinguishes us from the dictatorships
and the tribal societies where
differences are settled by the sword if
they’re even settled at all the best
antidote to hateful stupid and offensive
speech is intelligent persuasive in
nuanced speech and that’s as true for
gay rights in Russia
as it is for Halloween costumes here at
Yale thank you very much
[Applause]
[Music] you