Writing for his syndicated column, Jacob Sullum observes “The Gray Lady’s Inconsistent Defense of the First Amendment”. He’s right: the New York Times shows a bias for speech rights of liberal-leaning causes, but far less sympathy for speech rights in conservative causes. (Sullum: “The distinctions drawn by the Times are therefore hard to justify on constitutional grounds. They make more sense if you assume the paper’s editorialists are not eager to defend people’s rights when they have trouble identifying with them.”)
Sullum’s right — but then he knows, and we know — that this kind of bias at the NYT is objectionable but lawful: private parties may pick and choose, even in contradiction, the causes they wish to champion.
A fickle champion’s not a worthy one, but there are many of that ilk. If they are to change, then they will do so through persuasion alone.
One cannot feel so indifferent to the biases of government. Government favors, too, but here favoritism is often masked with a claim of neutrality. The state may contend that it isn’t picking sides, but merely wishes to advance a neutral, secular purpose. That’s a false neutrality — that supposedly neutral view is itself a side in a bigger debate.
Worse still, government taxes private citizens, and forcibly takes a part of their earnings, so that it can claim a prized and compulsory place in society, and in that place banish words and comments it deems insufficiently ‘neutral.’ The secular state is a compulsory, confiscatory bias against private conscience, thinly veiled as a impartial way of living.
If someone wants to build a private alternative, he does not do so with his full earnings at his disposal — he must build his private alternative only after government taxes him to build its supposedly neutral, but censorious, alternative. A world a prissy scolds, hectoring over what’s appropriate, is a world unsuited to a vigorous, free people. That a few middling men want to pretend their proper does not entitlement them to impose their conceits on an entire people.
I wholly support the First Amendment’s establishment clause — both government and faith are healthier if independent of each other.
What I do not support is government growing ever larger, taking more of the space and air that belongs properly to private, civil society, and imposing a false neutrality in that expanded space. Private alternatives are harder and harder to establish where everything is city-this, district-that, and state and federal still more.
That’s why the best answers to debates about what a municipal government or public district should limit or restrict call for limited public authority and robust private alternatives. Those who are wrongly burdened, for example, with what their children may say about a holiday, or what they may be taught, will find relief only in a society that does not permit the creeping overreach of government.
Private alternatives should not be difficult simply because government has already taxed away the private means to establish those alternatives. Available private choices lessen public conflicts.
I will readily concede that the New York Times is a mercurial advocate. More concerning, though, is the ceaseless bias and advocacy of supposedly neutral public authorities.