Is Saying What You Think Too Perilous? : Freedom: As recent events prove, what you say <i> can </i> be used against you. Some observers fear the implications on honest public debate of sensitive issues.

Yes, there is a God of Standards, and when it comes to what’s tolerated in public speech, he has been much abused in the past few weeks.

First, professional curmudgeon Andy Rooney is censored by his own network after he’s accused of (but denies) raising the specter of eugenics while talking about poor blacks.

Later, Sen. Daniel Moynihan (D.-N.Y.) creates a furor at Vassar College when he’s accused of (but denies) spouting a love-it-or-leave-it line at a Jamaican woman who disagrees with his rosy view of America’s melting pot.

And all along, John Silber, Boston University’s president who aspires to be Massachusetts governor, isn’t denying a single word of his many comments that have infuriated legions of people--blacks, Jews, Cambodians, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, you name it.

These incidents offer evidence anew that for those who dare to speak publicly about ideas that impinge on others’ images of themselves or their place in society, there can be trouble. Big trouble. Especially with the added complications of trying to focus big ideas into tiny electronic sound bites; or in getting remarks quoted correctly in context; or in keeping up with shifting societal rules that swiftly make some subjects simply topical, others taboo.

Some people fear these problems may be feeding a new fastidiousness in public discussion of tough issues like racism and homophobia. People don’t want to tackle these topics. What if they are misunderstood?

“Even I worry about too much line-drawing that says you can never say anything which can be deemed offensive by anyone in the world,” says Aryeh Neier, executive director of Human Rights Watch, an international monitoring group for free expression.

He also worries that people may give up saying in public what they really think. “I remember when Archie Bunker and ‘All in the Family’ first came on television,” Neier says. “So here we had someone who was always making racist remarks, treated as a joke. To some degree, I think it was healthy to have a lot of things like that articulated in a fashion in which there was clear disapproval, yet at the same time, they weren’t regarded as only subject for private talk.”

Richard Rodriguez, a San Francisco writer, shares Neier’s concerns and further complains about the apparent new public skittishness in talking about some topics: “People were shocked to hear that Andy Rooney lacks a kind of compassion for gays and blacks. But that’s because most of what we hear on television from people like him is vague and bloodless. We are horrified when the public discourse suddenly taps into our anxieties about ourselves and other people. We overreact.”

Rodriguez, who wrote a critically acclaimed but controversial memoir about growing up Mexican-American, is finishing a second book about Mexico.

And, he says, “I want to free Mexican-Americans to speak about Mother Mexico in ways that aren’t couched and careful but are candid. . . .

“I’m not so much advocating bad ethnic jokes,” as promoting “real conversation, up front”--telling talk that truly shows “what we believe about ourselves and how we see the world,” he adds. “I don’t learn (that) from the patter of a (CBS anchorman) Dan Rather or mindless conversation from our political leaders. We need the public equivalent to private remarks. If we repress this, we get a lot of homogenized views.”

Tom Stoddard, a longtime gay rights advocate, doesn’t want public discourse to become a bland chatter, either. But he says those who speak out must demonstrate a “new sensitivity to vocabulary and nuance.

“There are times when I feel burdened by the obligation to be careful . . . how I talk about the issues,” says Stoddard, executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. “But that burden is insufficient compared to the liberation the new vocabulary represents for millions of people in this country.”

Stoddard says he often thinks about how society would have dealt with the AIDS epidemic, if it had occurred 30 years ago, when mainstream publications often referred to homosexuals as “perverts” and even many doctors felt uncomfortable when publicly referring to many sexual practices.

“It is a harder world to live in,” Stoddard says, “but better, much better overall.”

But maybe not for politicians. Just ask candidate Silber, who has not repressed an unvarnished thought since he announced to run as a Democrat for governor of Massachusetts.

He has called his state a “welfare magnet” for immigrants and out-of-staters, calling one suburb the “Cambodian capital of America.” He has downplayed the dangers of alcoholism, compared to the nightmare of drug addiction. He has made remarks offensive to black and Jewish activists.

His critics say Silber has not chosen his words carefully. But he says he’ll keep talking, if possible right through the primaries. “Candidates who are not plastic, who are genuine, who have within their own consciousness the information to complete a coherent statement on a subject, are likely . . . to be more appealing to voters than those who are simply manufactured by their media consultants,” he told students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government last week. “When you’re speaking freely, as I am now, without the use of a text, I can obviously quite easily say something that may manage to offend somebody.

“It’s hard these days,” he added, “to find any group of individuals who aren’t organized in some fashion and subject to outrage at whatever one may say. But those are the risks, and I’m gonna try to proceed in this campaign on that basis. . . . “

Silber, however, may not understand that college presidents have different roles than politicians do in the public forum, says Martin Linsky, a former Boston politician who now teaches at the Kennedy School. “A college president’s role is to be provocative, like a parent, a teacher. But a governor is going to be in my living room each day, in my newspaper, and everything he says will be scrutinized. He has to make sure he’s being understood, that he’s connecting with a broad range of people. We all have to identify with him.”

But politicians don’t have to lie or mislead the public about their real feelings, says Frank Greer, a political consultant based in Washington. He says they simply must keep in mind that they will be scrutinized constantly by the media and their remarks will be carried widely if wrong-headed.

“So, somebody makes an off-hand comment at a luncheon at Duke Zeibert’s (a Washington watering hole) and by 6 o’clock it is broadcast into homes all over America,” Greer says. “So right there is the trade-off. But there is importance in encouraging a kind of civility in our political leaders. We don’t say these things, and, perhaps, someday, we don’t think them.”

But should a Rooney or Moynihan be judged by their occasional gaffe or their total careers? Rooney, in fact, is unhappy these days that some confuse him with Archie Bunker for his comments on blacks and gays--even those remarks he owns up to. He believes he was misunderstood, says Don Hewitt, his “60 Minutes” producer and friend.

“Sometimes people say things they don’t mean to say,” Hewitt says. “The great quip, the funny line, the bon mot, sometimes all of us indulge ourselves in a little rhetoric that, if we were to stand back and think about it a little longer, we would, perhaps, not avail ourselves of. We just wouldn’t tell that particular joke.”

But jokes themselves can be telling. Consider Polish jokes. For a long time, they were the mainstay of lunch rooms and coffee breaks, as if Poland was a country inhabited by three million Three Stooges.

But after witnessing Polish leader Lech Walesa’s moving address to Congress recently, and after seeing the force of freedom sweep Eastern Europe, who tells Polish joke now?