“I don’t see a lot of conservatives getting upset if minorities feel silenced”
In 1991 while he was a law student at Harvard, Obama was part of a panel made up almost entirely of other liberals which was all to happy to place restrictions on free speech.
Charles C. Johnson of The Daily Caller reports.
At Harvard Law School in 1991, Obama approved of restricting speech to protect minorities
At the height of early-1990s conservative backlash over political correctness and “speech codes” on U.S. college campuses, Barack Obama participated in a panel event geared toward denying that restrictions on free expression were problematic, or happening at all.
The 1991 Harvard Law School yearbook quoted the future President of the United States virtually shrugging his shoulders at the thought that non-liberal white students might take offense at restrictions on speech that minority students found objectionable. “I don’t see a lot of conservatives getting upset if minorities feel silenced,” Obama said, flipping the argument around.
In addition to Obama, who was by then the former Harvard Law Review editor, the panel included several prominent Harvard law professors; the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal director; Justice Stephen Breyer, who then presided over the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit; and Brian Timmons, an Obama classmate who had been the managing editor of the Harvard Journal on Law and Public Policy, which describes itself as “the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship.”
Some on the panel mocked the idea of political correctness stymieing free speech. “More voices are being heard on campuses,” said panelist Benjamin Schatz of the American Association of Physicians for Human Rights. “People who don’t like hearing them are complaining about political correctness.”
Unsurprisingly, the only libertarian minded person on the panel was the only one who defended the freedom of speech.
“It’s an insult to women and to other minorities to think they need special codes or regulations so that they won’t feel intimidated,” the law school yearbook recorded him saying at the time. He was, he later recalled, the “lone dissenter.”
“Nobody seriously questioned the goal of increasing the number of racial and ethnic minorities at HLS,” Timmons told TheDC. “But it seemed as those these diversity proponents didn’t exactly want more viewpoints on campus, nor did they want to just increase the numbers of racial and ethnic minorities. They wanted more minorities who embraced the same basic left-leaning political ideology of the HLS establishment.”
“In other words,” Timmons explained, “they wanted more people who looked different but thought the same.”
Timmons saw the panel itself as an ironic and “amusing illustration of the times.”
“On a panel purporting to explore whether the law school was in fact promoting a singular point of view, five of the six panelists promoted the same view,” he recalled.
At Harvard Law School in 1991, Obama approved of restricting speech to protect minorities (The Daily Caller)
