"However, we live in an increasingly censorious age. By this I mean that the broad, indeed international, acceptance of First Amendment principles is being steadily eroded. Many special-interest groups, claiming the moral high ground, now demand the protection of the censor. Political correctness and the rise of the religious right provide the pro-censorship lobby with further cohorts. I would like to say a little about just one of the weapons of this resurgent lobby, a weapon used, interestingly, by everyone from anti-pornography feminists to religious fundamentalists: I mean the concept of “respect.”

On the surface, “respect” is one of those ideas nobody’s against. Like a good warm coat in winter, like applause, like ketchup on your fries, everybody wants some of that. Sock-it-to-me-sock-it-to-me, as Aretha Franklin puts it. But what we used to mean by respect- what Aretha meant by it; that is, a mixture of good-hearted consideration and serious attention- has little to do with the new ideological usage of the word.

Religious extremists, these days, demand respect for their attitudes with growing stridency. Very few people would object to the idea that people’s rights to religious belief must be respected- after all, the First Amendment defends those rights as unequivocally as it defends free speech- but now we are asked to agree that to dissent from those beliefs- to hold that they are suspect, or antiquated, or wrong; that in fact, they are arguable- is incompatible with the idea of respect. When criticism is placed off limits as “disrespectful,” and therefore offensive, something strange is happening to the concept of respect. Yet in recent times both the American National Endowment for the Arts and the very British BBC have announced that they will use this new version of “respect” as a touchstone for their funding decisions.

Other minority groups- racial, sexual, social- have also demanded that they be accorded this new form of respect. To “respect” Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with him. To “diss” him is, equally simply, to disagree. But if dissent is also to be though a form of “dissing,” then we have indeed succumbed to the Thought Police. I want to suggest to you that citizens of free societies, democracies, do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around their fellow citizen’s opinions, even their most cherished beliefs. In free societies, you must have the free play of ideas. There must be argument, and it must be impassioned and untrammeled. A free society is not a calm and eventless place- that is the kind of static, dead society dictators try to create. Free societies are dynamic, noisy, turbulent, and full of radical disagreement. Skepticism and freedom are indissolubly linked; and it is the skepticism of journalists, their show-me, prove-it unwillingness to be impressed, that is perhaps their most important contribution to the freedom of the free world. It is the disrespect of journalists- for power, for orthodoxies, for party lines, for ideologies, for vanity, for arrogance, for folly, for pretension, for corruption, for stupidity, maybe even for editors- that I would like to celebrate this morning, and that I urge you all, in freedom’s name, to preserve."

Salman Rushdie
April 1996
“Farming Ostriches” Originally delivered as a keynote address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors