WHATEVER HAPPENED TO FREE SPEECH?
(…no matter how offensive it might be…especially if it is made in private)

The recent furor over the private rants of a super-rich ignoramus seems to have overlooked something, namely, the First Amendment.

Compared to many others of similar mindsets, Donald Sterling’s comments are more idiotic than purely “racist”, and perhaps more a matter of a misplaced lord-of-the-manor complex than anything else (I provide them with everything…so how dare they presume to be social equals…etc.).

Such attitudes are a sad reflection that we still have so many of these dinosaurs roaming around in our society, like that rancher in Nevada, whose public utterances were much more offensively racist than anything Sterling spouted out, yet, it caused hardly more than a brief public hiccup. Disgusting as such attitudes might be, what’s more troubling about this particular case is the almost universal disregard for Sterling’s First Amendment rights. No one seems to have raised any questions about that…not the media, not the NBA, not any of our politicos…no one, not even the ACLU.

Everyone has completely ignored the fact that his were comments made in a private exchange with another person, secretly recorded without his knowledge or consent, and then “somehow” leaked to TMZ…the digital world’s equivalent to one of those scandal rag sheets found at the supermarket check-out counter. So the question is… whatever happened to free speech…no matter how offensive it might be…especially if it is made in private? Leaving aside the stupidity of an 80-year-old man getting involved with a 30 something bimbette with an apparently strong publicity-seeking agenda (look at me, folks…hooked me a super-rich sugar daddy), we can’t help but wonder at the legality of what she did, or about her motives. Why secretly record a private conversation in the first place?

If the extreme and most obscene public actions and rants of the American Nazi Party years ago, in Skokie, Illinois, about “Jews” and “Niggers”, and how they were coming for them, etc., were upheld by the Supreme Court, as being covered by the First Amendment, and, a top litigator from the ACLU represented them in that case before the Court, why then are Sterling’s privately made, and much less extreme, comments not given the same treatment? The answer seems to be…because he is super-rich…is arrogantly in-your-face about it…and has never made it a secret about his perspectives and views on such issues.

So, while the penalties invoked against him are undoubtedly deserved, such a hysterical rush to judgment is based on a flawed foundation and everyone involved may find that, while moral outrage might make them feel better, the First Amendment will more than likely come back to bite them for it (top-gun litigators are probably already drooling about it).

As for Sterling, he’ll probably just go crying all the way to the bank from that forced sale imposed upon him.

CENTURION