Jay Sekulow gave a speech at Hamilton College on Constitution Day, advocating speech freedom and religious freedom. In his speech, he boldly pointed out the reality that we are promoting freedom publicly while limits on freedom are normal in many academic institutions. His raised examples of academic writing, nature of academic institutions, Ground Zero’s mosque, persecuted Mormon and German, indicating that we tend to avoid controversial topics because we are afraid to touch it.
Through his examples, I see the word “democracy” being torn into two parts: safe democracy and risky democracy. We can easily find examples of safe democracy in different academic institutions’ mottos, in slogans of different movements, and in government officers’ words. We always take it for granted when we hear it. However, as Sekulow suggested, incidents of a lack of democracy are happening more frequently than we would imagine, and there is hardly anyone mention about them. It has become our society’s hidden rule that there might be a cost if we bring forward a controversial topic. Therefore, it is risky to defend a certain group of people’s freedom, for example, minority’s religious freedom and their speech freedom.
It was very interesting for me to see that it is safe for us if we put a group of people’s freedom at risk, while it is risky for us if we defend the safety of a group of people.
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