Understanding the practical limits of free speech

It is not comedy alone that requires time and distance to make use of tragedy. Expressing certain serious points of view also often depends on both conditions.

And just as certain horrors can never be acceptable grist for humor, so certain outrageous points of view can never be acceptable material for responsible discussion.

This is an underlying lesson of the yearbook controversy at Glenbrook South High School and a similar issue in Bartlett. It is also a truth at the heart of the free-speech arguments roiling universities across the country. It is also a maxim central to the eternal debate in politics and publishing over the difference between censorship and editing.

It is also more easily discussed in the abstract than the specific.

The Glenbrook South commotion stems from the publication of a student’s description of the situation in Gaza as “not a war” and the declaration that after learning of the murders of nearly 1,200 people on Oct. 7, “I was happy because (the Palestinians are) finally defending themselves.”

Free-speech purists might argue that the right protects celebrating the brutal massacre of thousands of unarmed and innocent men, women and children, and perhaps there are circumstances in which expressing such an idea may be simultaneously reviled and tolerated. But rational thinkers know that there must be limits to the outrages that ought to be fodder for popular publication or reasonable discussion, and those limits certainly extend to high school yearbooks, as well as public media and university campuses.

And, more broadly, those limits also apply to the way we conduct productive discussions of all sensitive topics. Whatever the offenses of the Israeli government’s management of the Palestinian crisis over the years, no one who declares himself or herself “happy” about actions as horrific as those that occurred in Israel last Oct. 7 can be taken seriously. Nor could anyone be taken seriously who exults publicly in the horrific assaults by Israel in Gaza today. We have free speech, but newspaper editors — like administrators and teachers overseeing school publications and student protests — also have a duty to insist on some measure of sensible speech.

Hopefully, one of the byproducts of these controversies will be some insight into the harder question of how to achieve that balance. It is clear that no one has found the perfect answer yet. Along the way to that point, though, it is obvious that one of the saddest products of the debate at Glenbrook South, and more broadly on college campuses and in the press, is that outrageous language has overwhelmed the real issues at play in Israel and Gaza.

This is amply demonstrated by the fact that the heart of the Glenbrook student’s message, an understandable cry for more “focusing on the past” and therefore the harsh conditions to which the Palestinian people have been subjected, is almost totally lost in the debate. As another Glenbrook South student told the school board Tuesday, “For many Palestinians and their supporters, expressing solidarity with Palestine is not just a political statement, but a plea for recognition, justice and basic human rights.”

Who would argue that it is offensive to say the Palestinian people deserve recognition, justice and basic human rights? But, in the process, what reasonable, civilized person would equate “expressing solidarity with Palestine“ and praising the brutal atrocities of Oct. 7? Doing so hides hatred under the protection of free speech, a behavior that must be tolerated in the street but has no place in civil discourse.

In the present case, because such words breed offensive retaliation, we find ourselves practically willing to come to blows over emotional phrases and sensational words instead of working toward viable solutions to both the immediate and the long-term crisis. And, this tendency is not restricted to debates over the Middle East. It must be confronted on fronts ranging from religion to white supremacy to political preferences and beyond.

This really is the message that ought to be given to students and adults arguing whether, where and how provocative language should be tolerated.

Arguments over the limits of free speech have their academic value, but they too are subject to the lexical laws of time and distance. In immediate circumstances involving the lives and futures of real people, our debates take on more practical dimensions. Unless those dimensions are respected, we are destined to an environment of endless conflict, as, sadly, is all too evident in the events of the Middle East.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher.