Letters to the Editor.

Reed Goes Overboard

In my civil liberties class for high school students, I teach United States v. The Progressive, the 1979 atomic secrets case, as an example of national security claims run riot.

Thanks to Adolph L. Reed Jr. ("Horowitz's Provocation," May issue), I can now test students' understanding of free speech principles in another area: Is defiance of "social consensus" a basis for barring speech not only for David Horowitz but, let us imagine, for abolitionists in the antebellum South, for communists and socialists in the 1940s and 1950s, for Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama?

And even if "social consensus" is not as it seems on the surface, an absurdly overbroad restriction on expression, do we want self-appointed defenders of that "consensus" to destroy newspapers with which they disagree? Are black campus radicals in the North avatars of social consensus any more than their white-sheeted opposite numbers were in Mississippi?

No wonder the left is despised by so many Americans. I'm a leftist, but when I see pieces like Reed's, I hate the left.

John Roemer Parkton, Maryland

Rothschild Is Confused

As a new subscriber to The Progressive, I was disheartened to see Matthew Rothschild use his editorial space for a defense of David Horowitz's struggle against campus censorship ("Don't Censor Horowitz," May issue). At the risk of giving Horowitz even more free publicity, I must say that I believe all those who buy into Horowitz's view of censorship have a fundamental confusion about the relationship between freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Freedom of speech encompasses one's right to express oneself without hindrance. Freedom of the press involves a person's right to print and distribute information in any form that person chooses.

Horowitz claims to have been censored, as indeed he has been. But censorship is the free press right of any publication. For example, The Progressive can choose to print this letter, alter it before publication, or not print it at all. That is its right. Similarly, the Berkeley Daily Cal had every right to print the ad, not print the ad, or, as they did, print the ad and then print a retraction and an apology.

As for the removal of newspapers from campus racks, unwise and precipitous as this may have been, it would constitute a crime only if the publisher objected to such an action. It is quite possible that the publisher decided that the removal was in accordance with his or her wishes. Otherwise...