Urban Poly Princess

Collections Trainer at First Security Bank I used to tell new collectors we wanted to be so great at resolving delinquency that we didn't need the high-risk adjustors. "Our goal was to provide them with no work." Someone reported to my manager that I was trying to eliminate their department.

When I worked as a teleprompter for Channel 4 at the morning show Angie Larsen the traffic reporter for the morning show would say Westbounders for people driving West and Eastbounders for those driving East. Someone was offended by her use of the term Westbounders and emailed the station. She called and apologized to this stupid woman letting her know it was simply to indicate direction NOT anything else.

THE POINT : People will be offended all the time no matter what you say or do. Learn to expect that. It is easy to misunderstand, to not get the correct message. Remember the telephone game we've all played. The message is changed so much it rarely resembles what it started as.

The first amendment does not mean you can say anything at any time. Courts continuously define the nuances of the law especially the U. S. Supreme Court.

Over the years the courts have determined national security, justice or personal safety are more important than freedom of speech. There are no simple rules although there are general tests:

Clear and Present Danger - Does it create a dangerous situation? Freedom of Speech does not protect statements made to provoke violence or incite illegal action.

Justice Holmes said for the unanimous Supreme Court, "The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."

Fighting Words - Was something said Face-to-face that would incite immediate violence?

The court determined in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire that the statute in question , 'did no more than prohibit the face-to-face words plainly likely to cause a breach of the peace by the addressee, words whose speaking constitute a breach of the peace by the speaker -- including classical fighting words, words in current use less classical but equally likely to cause violence, and other disorderly words, including profanity, obscenity and threats.

Tongan Trash... Kill Them All seems to meet both tests. Over 100 people called the University of Utah to ask for Todd Shrum's dismissal.

I received 3 Facebook requests urging me with the telephone number to call and ask for him to be fired.

The University of Utah released the following after his resignation:

"The University is also committed to freedom of speech and expression among its employees, However, hate speech and violent comments are unacceptable when this language enters the work place and affects the safety and trust of patients and hospital employees."

Hate speech definition, speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.

Shrum's remarks seem to definitely fall in like with this definition,

http://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/initiatives_awards/students_in_action/debate_hate.html


In this country there is no right to speak fighting words—those words without social value, directed to a specific individual, that would provoke a reasonable member of the group about whom the words are spoken. For example, a person cannot utter a racial or ethnic epithet to another if those words are likely to cause the listener to react violently. However, under the First Amendment, individuals do have a right to speech that the listener disagrees with and to speech that is offensive and hateful.
Think about it. It’s always easier to defend someone’s right to say something with which you agree. But in a free society, you also have a duty to defend speech to which you may strongly object.

One way to deal effectively with hate speech is to create laws and policies that discourage bad behavior but do not punish bad beliefs. Another way of saying this is to create laws and policies that do not attempt to define hate speech as hate crimes, or “acts.” In two recent hate crime cases, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that acts, but not speech, may be regulated by law.
R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992), involved the juvenile court proceeding of a white 14-year-old who burned a cross on the front lawn of the only black family in a St. Paul, Minn., neighborhood. Burning a cross is a very hateful thing to do: it is one of the symbols of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that has spread hatred and harm throughout this country. The burning cross clearly demonstrated to this family that at least this youth did not welcome them in the neighborhood. The family brought charges, and the boy was prosecuted under a Minnesota criminal law that made it illegal to place, on public or private property, a burning cross, swastika, or other symbol likely to arouse “anger, alarm, or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender.” The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Minnesota law was unconstitutional because it violated the youth’s First Amendment free speech rights.
Note that the Court did not rule that the act itself—burning a cross on the family’s front lawn—was legal. In fact, the youth could have been held criminally responsible for damaging property or for threatening or intimidating the family. Instead, the law was defective because it improperly focused on the motivation for—the thinking that results in—criminal behavior rather than on criminal behavior itself. It attempted to punish the youth for the content of his message, not for his actions.
Libertarians believe that individuals have the right to free speech and that government should be able to limit it only for the most compelling reasons. Most libertarians recognize fighting words as an example of a sufficiently compelling reason to limit free speech. Notwithstanding the libertarian viewpoint, the courts have been careful to interpret this exception narrowly.
Communitarians take a different approach. They believe that the community’s well-being is society’s most important goal and that an individual’s right to free speech may be limited in the interests of community harmony. They believe that treating people with fairness and dignity justifies at least some free-speech restrictions-that eliminating or reducing hate speech is a sufficiently compelling goal to justify government regulation. Communitarians would expand the fighting words doctrine to allow for increased government regulation.