speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

Perverse Penalties
disturbance in twentieth-century American history the Combined
Law Enforcement Association of Texas, the Los Angeles Police
Protective League, and the Fraternal Order of Police declared a
boycott of the record. A Latina Los Angeles city councillor running
for Congress urged Time Warner to withdraw it and local radio
stations to stop playing it. The California Attorney General wrote to
the executives of 18 record chains. The Houston city council
denounced the lyrics. Three record store chains with more than a
thousand outlets pulled the song. Ice-T bristled: "What they're really
trying to do is shut down my platform. They do not want to let me be
able to speak to the masses. ... I'm going to talk about this record
on the next record." Predictably, the campaign had the opposite
effect. Sales jumped 60 per cent in Los Angeles, 100 per cent in
Austin, San Antonio and Dallas, and 370 per cent in Houston; the
album climbed from 62nd to 49th on the charts, selling 330,000
copies in 17 weeks. Ice-T sold out a live performance in Los Angeles.
When he unexpectedly withdrew the song six weeks after the
controversy began, to prove he was not motivated by profits, there
was a run on the 150,000 unsold records. He continued to maintain
that "Cop Killer" "is not a call to murder police. This song is about
anger and the community and how people get that way."
V. Conclusion
Governmental bans on speech suffer the problems common to all
state regulation and some that are unique. Law dichotomises experience,
rupturing its inherent continuities. Boundaries are arbitrary
and therefore indeterminate. It is impossible to distinguish unlawful
speech from the routine opportunism of politicians pandering to
popular prejudice: an Enoch Powell, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Patrick
Buchanan, David Duke, Dan Quayle, or George Bush emphasising
the "costs" of immigration, calling for "law and order," depicting
AIDS as divine retribution, attacking racial quotas, or extolling
family values. Legal distinctions elevate form over substance: sceptics
may attack religious belief as long as they do not mock the
believer; filmmakers may exploit sex if they portray the behaviour as
mutual or add an artistic veneer; racists and anti-Semites can indulge
their hatred in the language of pseudo-science or history.
Legal efforts to regulate speech founder on the ineradicable
ambiguity of meaning. The significance and moral valence of symbols
vary radically with speaker and audience and can reverse
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