Commentary

JOHN BRUMMETT: What freedom means

Six women basketball players at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville declined to stand for the national anthem and flag presentation before their exhibition game victory at home Thursday night. They were protesting police treatment of blacks.

Their coach, Jimmy Dykes, and athletic director, Jeff Long, defended them. Enraged boosters threatened to withhold financial support for the Razorback program. Republican politicians talked of punishing the university in its budget.

Free countries do not mandate demonstrations of allegiance to national symbols. Fascist countries do.

It's tragic, then, that some people extol the freedom of our great country in the same breath with which they demand that others not be permitted the freedom to decline to perform prevailing rituals.

The greatness of American freedom is showcased, not attacked, when young collegiate women basketball players perform a protest and the rest of us consider that protest or at least indulge or ignore it.

Aha, reply the freedom-intolerant: You hypocritical liberal thinkers defend the right of the young women to protest, but you would deny our right to express our disdain for their action.

Not so. I indeed defend the young women's right to protest. I also defend someone's right to express disdain for the young women and their protest.

What I seek to deny--proudly, fervently, vitally, constitutionally--is one's presumption to enforce on others his intolerance of freedom. Some people seek to deny the young women's right because its exercise outrages them. But I don't seek to deny those people's expression of disdain, though it outrages me.

The freedom-intolerant reply: Well, yes, but you and those young women basketball players show no respect for our brave fighting men and women who have died for our freedom, and whose service is honored by that anthem and that flag.

To the contrary, I--and I suspect they--respect greatly our brave fighting men and women. These fighting men and women indeed defend our freedom, which is precisely what I seek for all. But it is precisely what the freedom-intolerant defend conditionally, only for those performing ritualistic subservience to symbols.

It shortchanges our military combatants to say they are fighting for symbols. They are fighting for the real thing.

Well, OK, then, the freedom-intolerant argue: Sure, the young women have a right of free expression, but they don't have the right to exercise that freedom while representing a taxpayer-supported institution, which could and should forbid their action.

Yes, the university could decline to let the women play or take their scholarships. But an institution of higher education would prefer not to stifle the very central thing it is supposed to nurture, meaning free and informed thinking by its students.

And may I be candid? Black athletes are prominent in contemporary intercollegiate sports competition. A university would rather not muzzle athletes who are protesting perceived injustice against blacks.

Well, then, the freedom-intolerant ask: Don't we who are outraged have the right to stop making donations to the athletic department that permits this action we disdain, and to resume making donations only if the university stops these young women from behaving so offensively?

Yes, there indeed exists one practical restriction on free expression in our great land. It is the practical restriction applied by the ruling resource--money.

I have the constitutional right to express these opinions. But the owner of the newspaper has the personal freedom and economic power to prevent me from exercising that right under his aegis.

I would maintain the right to continue to express these opinions, perhaps in a blog called "Views from the Poor House."

So, yes, this great nation indeed offers one permissible restriction on the freedom of these young women to express themselves. It could play out by this scenario: Donations would run harmfully short and the Razorback athletic empire, to survive, would prevent the young women from expressing themselves, most easily by having the national anthem played and the flag presented while they were still in the dressing room.

Finally, at least three Republican state legislators--Sen. Alan Clark of Hot Springs, Rep. Laurie Rushing of Hot Springs and Rep. Kim Hammer of Benton--have threatened to invoke legislative budgeting power to punish the university financially unless it denies freedom to these young women.

But the power to appropriate public money is not properly a power to punish. It is properly a privileged power laden with a responsibility to provide quality educational opportunities.

Some Republican legislators actually seem to invoke punishing the university's non-athletic students for these student-athletes' audacious exercise in American liberty.

Finally, about today's election: My final guess is that the closing trend is to Hillary Clinton and that she will win with an electoral tally ranging from 271 to 339. That's conventional thinking, which has been incorrect at every turn this year.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 11/08/2016

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