The state Senate on Monday passed a bill that would make it a class E fel ony to place, draw or otherwise display a noose – on public or private property – and too bad about the First Amendment.
Now, the temptation for legislators to get tough on nooses has been understandably strong recently – given the lawmakers’ proclivity to pander, and the uproar over the noose found on a black professor’s door at Columbia’s Teachers’ College earlier this month and the ensuing series of apparent copycat incidents.
Disgusting occurrences, each and every one – but they’re no excuse for an end-run around free-speech rights.
Supporters of the bill assert that the measure merely includes the noose, a symbol of racist lynchings in the Jim Crow south, in a legal category of harassment that already covers swastikas and burning crosses. Threats – which these things often are – are not typically considered constitutionally protected speech.
Still, the bill remains problematic. What, for example, constitutes “harassment”? And who gets to decide?
(The New York Civil Liberties Union – that self-proclaimed defender of constitutional rights – punted yesterday, promising only to study the issue. How timid – on a bill that poses a substantial threat to free-speech rights.)
The noose is a hateful symbol of a shameful chapter in American history. But responding to it by doing violence to the First Amendment gives the bigots a dangerous victory.