Audience Exercised 1st Amendment Rights

Re “Graduation Speech Riles Sacramento,” Dec. 20: Thor Halvorssen, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, draws the wrong conclusions from the negative crowd response to Janis Heaphy’s Cal State Sacramento commencement address. The 1st Amendment restrains government and, by extension, some other institutions from inhibiting free expression. It does not prevent individuals from responding to speakers with whom they disagree.

The issues Heaphy raised are as well understood by most of the audience as they are by Heaphy. The listeners reflexively and rightly concluded that neither law nor custom nor their desire to honor the graduates required them to sit quietly as subservient schoolchildren while their political judgments were assailed. The Sacramento audience simply responded to the ancient maxim, Qui tacet consentire videtur. They did not agree so they were not silent.

William R. Snaer

Lake Arrowhead

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Heaphy, publisher of the Sacrament Bee, was asked to give a graduation speech at Cal State Sacramento. Rather than be commended for doing so she was booed by an audience that did not like her views. The problem lies not with Heaphy or her speech but rather with Cal State Sacramento, which clearly failed in its primary mission of education. Those in the audience, alumni and students who booed rather than listened, whether they agreed or not, may have been trained but they certainly were not educated.

Arthur Yuwiler

Woodland Hills

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I am exercising my right to “free speech” by adding my unsolicited comment concerning Heaphy’s speech. One must wonder how someone like her reaches the lofty position of publisher of a major newspaper without knowing what “free speech” means.

“Free speech” isn’t “free” at all. One pays for it with the consequences of one’s decision to exercise it. One should not expect to be rewarded for speaking one’s mind when the type of speech delivered is inappropriate to the occasion.

Rather than encouraging college graduates to question authority, something they do anyway without needing to be told, why not encourage them to serve their country and to protect it from its enemies the way our freedom-fighting liberators in Afghanistan have done? That would be a challenging message, appropriate for any occasion.

William J. Becker Jr.

Los Angeles