February 3, 2000. By Joe Sobran. “How can you defend an oaf like John Rocker?” a friend asked me recently. “I don’t disagree with you, but when you take up his cause you’re just begging to be called a racist yourself.”
Well, being smeared as a “racist” is just part of the game these days. Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s evisceration of libel law in the name of the First Amendment, you can’t do much about it. But the worst thing you can do is to accept the role of defendant and let yourself be intimidated by the ethos of laissez-faire libel.
Rocker, the Atlanta Braves’ star relief pitcher, has now been fined and suspended for the early part of the coming season by Major League Baseball’s commissioner, Bud Selig. The sentence also includes “sensitivity training,” on top of the psychological examination Rocker has already submitted to. Selig said that Rocker’s unflattering remarks about New York “offended practically every element of society and brought dishonor to himself, the Atlanta Braves, and Major League Baseball.”
Personally, I disliked Rocker from the first time I saw him pitch. He’s an abrasive man, like a lot of athletes nowadays. But that doesn’t justify New York’s fans in spitting on him, pouring beer on him, and throwing batteries at him. Neither do his opinions about New York justify Selig in punishing him and, particularly, humiliating him as a thought-criminal in need of a Soviet-style “cure.”
If Rocker had broken some well-defined rule, it would be one thing. But Major League Baseball, as far as I know, has no speech code. Selig himself has brought dishonor on the sport by trying, in a totally arbitrary manner, to impose taboos on the expression of opinion – taboos that didn’t apply to Ted Turner’s crude jokes about Catholics, the Pope, and Poles. (Turner, the Braves’ owner, has apologized; but so has Rocker, unavailingly.)
Rocker has been roundly condemned as a “racist” even though he never mentioned race. But liberal invective is routinely accepted as free speech. Read More Here
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–Admin
