Free Speech and Diversity

I am too old to be an absolutist about anything in life. Shades of grey not only infect one’s mane but also one’s main views as we age, and I am no different here.

Free Speech and the First Amendment that undergirds our right to exercise it, is the exception that proves (i.e., tests) the rule.

Last Thursday’s decision by a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit filed by (sadly, former) Waukesha School District teacher, Melissa Tempel, against the District for firing her, is an unbridled and unprincipled attack on that fundamental right.

Let me say it again:

It is an unbridled and unprincipled attack on our First Amendment right to Free Speech, one that I hope and pray is struck down on appeal.

For context, Ms. Tempel tweeted out, on her private Twitter (now, X) account, her disapproval of the District administration’s 2023 decision to cancel-culture her selection of the song “Rainbowland” for her first-graders’ spring concert. (FYI: This song was originally sung by Miley Cyrus and that super-controversial legend of country music, one Ms. Dolly Parton.)

I do not deny the District’s administration’s right to veto Ms. Tempel’s choice of song. She is their employee, after all, and they have every right to enforce their distaste for a multitude of colors in the District, preferring a menu of white light only in its stead (if, indeed, that is their motivation, on which I simply cannot pronounce).

What I do, in fact, deny is their ability to fire this dedicated teacher for exercising her First Amendment right to hold forth as a private citizen on matters of public concern.

The federal judge in question appears to demur on this point—although she denies it—citing the District’s competing interest in workplace efficiency and the avoidance of disrupting District operations.

The judge appears to be saying that Ms. Tempel’s First Amendment right to point out—on her own time and via channels of communication having no affiliation with the District—deficiencies in the decision-making of her governmental employer (a matter of public concern, if there ever were one) is disallowed by the inconvenience that this speech might cause that same employer.

Think that one through for a second.

Do we really want whistleblowers with specialized knowledge of the internal failings of the governmental entities employing them silenced on the grounds that their revelations might disrupt the system that they challenge in their capacity as private citizens?

Really? REALLY??

Back to Ms. Tempel’s firing… Is the message here really supposed to be that her Free Speech rights are Trumped by the District’s right not to have to deal with the (sometimes regrettable) consequences of its own idiocy?

I cannot tolerate such intolerance. And I will not do so where I have the means to stop it.

Therefore, I will be introducing legislation at the local level to protect the free speech rights of our city employees from a Waukesha-School-District species of infringement by our own City Government.

In so doing, I aim to throw down a gauntlet…to the Mayor, to the Chiefs, to the Municipal Courts, and to the other elected officials within City Government with whom I have the honor to serve. Commit to protecting the vein of criticism that will be, not our undoing, but our path to much-needed self-reflection, improvement, and even innovation.

If the Federal Courts won’t protect our employees’ First Amendment rights (and I still have hope that they ultimately will), then we should mind the gap, and mend it.

We are a nation of diversity, founded as such in the realm of religion, and—only too slowly and painfully—forged as such in the realm of race and ethnicity. This diversity, it is said over and over again, is our strength. But why?

The virtues attaching to diversity are not merely aesthetic. They are practical; they are real; they are imperative.

They live in the idea that a diversity of lived experience brings with it a diversity of viewpoints, by incorporating which we, collectively, outflank and arrive at a nearer conception of the truth.

This diversity of viewpoint unfolds a plenitude of possibility in our empathy and decision-making, and by cultivating—not cancelling—it, we tap the potential of the representative republic established by the Founders and improved by their inheritors.

In the end, Free Speech is the prism with which we unlock this potential, freeing this diversity to render its natural and enviable effects.

Attacks on it (to gladly mix metaphors) fray not only the coat of many colors we now don in our work on the Great American Experiment, but in so doing, they fray the very fabric of the democratic republic that is its lasting legacy.

NB: Written without any assistance from AI. As if…

Concluding quotation:

“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

–John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Chapter 2

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.