I'm An Advocate for Free Speech

My last entry about heterosexual supremacist Bert Chapman was largely dedicated to exposing his argument as the charade that it is. I stand by what I said and think that it was important and necessary. Since then several students including myself have written letters to The Exponent and will be holding demonstrations on campus calling for Purdue University administrators, faculty, staff, students and alumni to rebuke Chapman for his comments. In doing so, many reasonable (and one or two unreasonable) people have expressed concern that we are seeking to punish someone for exercising their freedom of speech.

As a long time owner of unpopular opinions I have a strong attachment to that freedom (In fact, in 5th grade I informed my principal, Mr. Miller, that he was violating my constitutional right to express myself by banning Magic:The Gathering during lunch/recess) and have a lot of respect for this concern. The following is an excerpt from a message I sent to a friend who expressed this concern:

I really respect your concern (which many share) and think you deserve a thoughtful reply.

The issue at hand is not just that what Chapman said is offensive; people hating queer people and letting everyone know about it is so common it would be futile to try to organize against it. The reason I think this is worth taking a stand against is that Chapman is easily identifiable as a tenured faculty person at Purdue (his blog is a link on his official Purdue page and a search for his name pulls up his Purdue page as the first result) and the disregard for academic integrity, professed professional incompetence, and unprofessional mistreatment of students and colleagues reflects poorly on the university and, by extension, devalues a Purdue education. Things like this also make it more difficult for the university to attract quality glbt students and faculty (would you want to have to call Chapman a colleague?).

It's not attacking Mr. Chapman's freedom of expression to use our own freedom of expression to say that his article was totally out of line and detrimental to the university. I'm not asking him to take down his post or his site, or even to apologize for his clear distaste for queer people; what I am doing is insisting that people who disagree with his assessment that gay people are worthless say so (so his voice isn't the only one people associate with the Purdue community).

I believe it's also important that scholars, academics, and educated people have fair and reasonable discourse. If Chapman had written an insightful argument with any kind of reasonable basis and a genuine interest in the truth we could have had respectful and meaningful discourse based on facts and intellect. Instead Chapman rather blatantly smeared an entire group of people without any regard to [whether] what he was saying was true or not. I think educated people have to insist that debate and discourse be fair and grounded in a respect for the truth. Chapman's charade of an argument is unacceptable for a scholar (especially one at this school) and I'm saying so.

The thought I want to leave you with is that I really do have a deep respect for freedom of expression, and what I am trying to do is not stop one person from using it; I'm encouraging thousands of people to start using it.

The first demonstration will be this Wednesday from 9am-5pm on the HSEE side of Stewart. I hope many of you will stop by and show your support. You can also follow the event on facebook.

**Edit 1: I updated the first link so that it goes to the google cache of Chapman's original entry, instead of his recently edited one.