The antiwar group which I co-founded in 2003 has repeatedly struggled for the right to publicly speak out against US foreign policy, and many of us have been thrown in jail for doing so. Time after time we have had to fight for our right to publicly demonstrate, and on three particular occasions the city of St. Petersburg, FL tried to criminalize our protests outside of a shopping mall . The city's rationale for trying to chill our 1 st Amendment rights was that our peaceful demonstrations created a "public safety hazard."
Maybe that's one reason it is so appalling to watch liberals today try to prevent people from speaking in public. I'm assuming the Berkeley crowd would not try to shut our antiwar protests down because they would agree with the message. But this just points out the disingenuousness of many of today's college campuses whose message seems to be, "it's OK for you to speak if I agree with you, otherwise, I have the right to use any means necessary to prevent you from expressing your views."
Obviously, many of today's liberals and college students really don't want equality. They want a world in which a person's race, gender, sexual preference, citizenship status and political beliefs determine whether or not that person has the right to speak.
Why can't they just be honest and say something like, "people of color, women and gay people have been on the short end of the stick for so long (I generally agree with this, though I know many black people who have had it easier than many white people I know, and many women who've had it better than many men I know), so now historically oppressed people get to decide the rights of everyone else. And even though we don't like police, we are going to be the world's morality police."
If this were the message of those at places like UC Berkeley, I would respect their honesty, even though I disagree with them. But they won't say that out loud because it would expose them as being two-faced and most of society would reject their views.
History will most certainly leave these people in the dust, but in the meantime my hope is that the antiwar movement's message does not get disregarded due to the reactionary, hypocritical and repressive behavior of so many of my cohorts today.
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