The First's place

Amendment preserves free speech, not tactful speech

Last year, the U.S. Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, limiting the publication of "indecent" material -- in the form of both text and images -- on the Internet. Soon after, World Wide Web pages turned black in protest. Cyber-sites blasting with rather blunt sentiments toward U.S. Sen. James Exon (D-Neb.), the man responsible for the indecency provision, practically exploded in size and number.

And now we have this film, The People vs. Larry Flynt. But isn't the same tired issue at stake here -- the First Amendment? That "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech," actually just one of six rights listed in the passage?

Yes and no.

Flynt, the porn mogul who made his living by hustling women to pose nude (often times with props) in Hustler magazine, was made an example of Constitutional boundaries by our judicial system. He was not, however, a very good example of anything else, as attested to in the movie by his insatiable disrespect.

In order to live in the United States, we have to learn to take the good with the bad and the slime with the sublime. America is the sum of its parts, and despite the fact that not all the people will agree with all of the culture all the time, the vast churning (sometimes ugly) mass we call our society has one dominant trait. Its range, as wide open as the spread legs on a Hustler cover, supports us all, allows for all of us to find a place and a mode of expression that better suits our wants.

For Larry Flynt, that mode involves shock-porn. For others, like Gloria Steinem, it involves protesting in a recent New York Times column Flynt's life and media concoction as a "champion of the First Amendment."

Steinem's words probably hold a bit more discursive value than Flynt's magazine, at least for anyone with an ounce of taste.

Larry Flynt may not have been a hero or a champion, but what he (and perhaps more accurately, his attorney) did by fighting for the right to free expression was definitely valuable, if for no other reason than it supports us all in our protected rights to think and speak the way we choose.

Education, the membrane that gives us the ability to discern which materials are assets and which are just plain trash, is the ultimate key to our strength as a culture. We may not want to embrace all of the smut that's out there, but it should still be out there for us to find, just in case good taste ever finds us wanting.

And because the First Amendment guarantees our right to express ourselves freely, it has to occasionally allow us certain liberties, just because we have the option to take them. We should never underestimate the value of that freedom.

Including, for example, the freedom to use the word fuck in this editorial.

It may be in bad taste, but sometimes taste has to be sacrificed to find the limits of our rights of expression.