JOHNSON: Freedom of speech took a hit along with Churchill

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published July 27, 2007 at midnight

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My two, three and four inflation-adjusted cents . . .

Any tenured University of Colorado professor who says the firing of Ward Churchill will not limit or otherwise affect academic free speech and other freedoms, I wouldn't want teaching my children.

It is so patent a lie that they should have the dignity not to even address it. No, what happened to Ward Churchill should keep them up at night.

Maybe, too, I have a certain soft spot for anyone, no matter how knuckleheaded, who gets savaged simply for speaking his gut. And that is exactly what the CU professor got.

In the long-ago paper he wrote, he did succumb to hyperbole, went for shock value. He dared call dead Americans "little Eichmanns."

So stupid. So heartless.

Yet what happened next? The then-governor and talk radio and TV loudmouths all jumped him, scoured his DNA - no Native American he! - and even took on his wife before jamming a scope into every nook and crevice of his professional and private life.

So challenged, CU first, and quite laughingly, swore up and down it had no problem with what the man had written as his opinion. No, no, the true crime, they later had learned, was plagiarism and bad scholarship. They were merely forced to act.

I won't even give Hank Brown and the Board of Regents a "perhaps" on this one. They flat fired the guy for what he had written as opinion. It is that simple.

If Ward Churchill had known what ultimately was going to happen to him, I'd bet even he would have simply played 21 questions in his paper, forcing students and others to figure out for themselves his beliefs about why the terrorists of Sept. 11 hit the World Trade Center, a paper that likely never would have been read, much less remembered.

Even the rocket scientists at the university must now know to keep it plain vanilla bland, or shut their mouths altogether. Heaven knows what might next tick off Bill O'Reilly, a man who is lucky he does not hold CU tenure. If outrageousness and lack of scholarship can trigger firing, he would have been looking for work long ago.

The real losers in the entire affair are CU students, the very people President Brown and the regents supposedly were protecting. Kids, I firmly believe, want to be challenged, can handle outrageousness, flip the hood on it, look it over and see it for what it is.

At least I hope this is true, given that TV and the talk shows don't appear to be going away anytime soon.

I have to give Gordon his say. He finally picked up his messages. You might remember him.

He runs Neighborhood Red Alert, which I wrote about the other day. And truth told, he seemed like a decent, sweetheart of a guy, which I had not expected. Truth told, too, he was the last guy I expected to hear from.

I'd written of how he had scared the socks off my wife and neighbors earlier this week, leaving his scary advertisements on our front doors. Many folks flooded the phone lines to the police station as a result.

The gist of his ads: "A SEX OFFENDER HAS MOVED INTO YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD!"

"I scare people?" the 72-year-old asked in all earnestness.

"Well, it's probably a good thing to put a little scare into people," he said, "particularly if they have little ones running around. Wouldn't you want to know?"

His name is just Gordon, he says, refusing to give me his last name.

"I've been invited to be on all the TV news shows, the radio. I always refuse. I'm not in this to get famous," he says. "How would you like to have all these sex offenders know your name?"

And sure, he says, he is charging people $4.95 a month to alert them when a sex offender moves into their neighborhood, information anyone can get online for free.

"It's like mowing your lawn. You can hire someone to do it for you, or you can do it yourself. I'm the guy you hire. And besides, I'm giving them the first three months for free."

He started Neighborhood Red Alert a couple of months ago, he says out of frustration that in Colorado, sex offenders do not do the mandatory 25 years in prison as called for by Jessica's Law, first passed by Florida two years ago to reduce child molesters' ability to reoffend.

"If you could curb, even by one or two, children being molested, wouldn't what I do be worth it?" Gordon asks. "I'm not twisting anyone's arm to sign up . . . "

"If it scares people, if that's wrong, OK," he says. "But I don't think it is. Maybe what I do will wake some people up, particularly in the legislature, to get Jessica's Law passed here."

He says his outfit does not for a second sell e-mail addresses to spammers, as some in law enforcement maintain. All e-mail addresses, he says, are kept confidential.

"Here's the bottom line of everything I'm doing," Gordon explains:

"A molester doesn't care about your kid, my kid, anyone's kid. They're on the Internet and everywhere else doing everything they can to get at them. Doesn't that scare you?"

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763

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