People for the American Way

Bill Retisma’s letter defending censorship in school curricula (Readers Write, Sept. 5) as “The American Way,” exemplifies the Orwellian doublespeak it accuses People for the American Way of using.

Reitsma has managed to achieve the highest aim of doublespeak, which is to hold two contradictory notions simultaneously. In “1984,” Winston Smith must learn, for example, that “Freedom is slavery” and “war is peace.” Apparently, Reitsma wants us to see that consumerism is citizenship, censorship is freedom, and that democracy extends only to the “acceptable.”

It is not the same to say, “I won’t buy that microwave,” and “Students in public schools cannot read ideas I don’t `buy.’ ” Consumers are free to make choices about what to buy in the marketplace, but citizens are obliged to value public needs and historical democratic values as well as their own transitory wants.

Sorry, Mr. Reitsma, but the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution to insure that “structure and stability” (translate the “status quo”?) wouldn’t become the tyranny of the “acceptable” over the “inappropriate” through control of public speech or the press. We are all protected by its unbrella. With its protections, we may freely argue against ideas spoken or written in the public domain, that is, to censure, but we are equally prohibited from censoring, or just silencing, such speech.

Instead of making unsupported insinuations that People for the American Way protect only the rights of people like themselves, I believe it is more appropriate to ask what we would all lose if watchdog groups like People for the American Way and Amnesty International disappeared. Virginia Hatlen Bangor