Protecting the freedom of speech - 7 March 1997

A small item, that practically no one picked up, involving a young actress attending a script reading of, the cast hoped, a forthcoming play.

She was a curious young woman. I don't mean from our point of view, I mean she had the blessed gift of curiosity and wasn't going to let anything by that she didn't understand. At one point she interrupted the reading and said aloud to the director, "Excuse me! But what are the Ten Commandments?" She didn't mean she'd like to have her memory nudged and hear them enumerated, she meant simply "I've been hearing about them, but what are they?"

This will be a laughable item probably to most adult listeners, though it never does for one generation to assume what the next generation does or doesn't know. I've never taken any so-called general knowledge question for granted ever since a reputable polling group took a survey in 1940 when Mr Churchill's speeches seemed the only thing that stood against a Nazi invasion.

The survey reported that, at that time, 4% of the population of the United Kingdom had never heard of Winston Churchill. I shouldn't be surprised if many more, millions of young men and women, self-proclaimed Christians or Jews, if they were equally candid, would also wonder what are the Ten Commandments? And I'll bet any number of listeners, at this moment, would not care to call them off in sequence.

A story, new to me, was about a rabbi and a priest who met once a week for lunch and shared the joys and tribulations of their calling. One day the priest was very glum, very sad. He'd lost his bicycle and he was pretty sure that one of his congregation had stolen it.

"Very simple", said the rabbi, "next Sunday, weave your sermon around the Ten Commandments. And when you come to 'Thou shalt not steal', pause! Look up! And see the face of the guilty party!" The priest enthusiastically followed the suggestion and at their next lunch he was a much more cheerful man.

"What did I tell you?" said the rabbi. "Well", said the priest, "not quite in that way. I recited 'Thou shalt not steal' and looked up. And nothing! Not a blush anywhere! So... so, I went on through the rest. And the moment I'd recited the Seventh Commandment, I remembered that's where I'd left my bicycle!" When I was told this story, the teller said "the Eighth". I laughed immediately, it would have been bad manners to say, "By the way, it's the Seventh!"

But now the inquisitive young lady is certain to have heard or read about the Ten Commandments because they've just been voted on by the House of Representatives and there isn't a paper in the land that didn't report the result. Which was 295 in favour, 125 against. In favour of the Ten Commandments?

Well, not quite. It goes back to a county judge in a small town in the Deep South, in Alabama. Judge Roy Moore. Two years ago, he put up as a display in his courtroom, a wooden carving of the Ten Commandments. After a while, several residents objected and then, you may be sure, in moved ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, the venerable guardian of civil rights of everybody. No matter how repulsive their behaviour, or whatever form of expression they used that can be stretched to come under the blanket protection of the first amendment to the Constitution, the one that guarantees freedom of speech.

Free speech has been taken by ACLU down the decades to defend the widest conceivable range of publishers, performers, exhibitionists, eccentrics, politicians from Neo-Nazis wanting to parade through a small town to the publisher of a pornographic magazine printing the vilest, crudest photos of violent and demeaning sex. Nobody, no institution in America has upheld more consistently and doggedly Justice Holmes' famous old dictum, "Free speech is freedom for the speech we loathe".

Well, it took some time for the legal contest between Judge Moore and the American Civil Liberties Union to come to trial. But a circuit court judge eventually agreed with the plaintiff, ACLU, and ordered Judge Moore to remove the offending Commandments plaque. Judge Moore promptly took his case up to the Alabama Supreme Court which arrested the circuit court's ruling till it had pondered the case further. And Judge Moore kept his plaque.

The civil liberties point has not, for once, to do with freedom of speech, but with the other guarantee in the same amendment, indeed, in the same sentence, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". Which has always meant prohibiting the expression of any particular religion in a public place where citizens, who are not of that religion or any religion, are likely to gather.

Judge Moore's courtroom is plainly such a place and, you might wonder, why he stands so firm. But his has become the hottest issue in the State of Alabama and its governor has promised to call out members of the National Guard to keep the plaque up on the wall. Why Congress should want to get into the act has not been explained in the stories I've seen. Congress has no power to do anything about it unless it wants to pass a constitutional amendment improving or on amending the famous First and overturning the historic separation of church and state.

Perhaps, very likely I think, an awful lot of Congressmen felt they were being trapped into declaring that they were against the Ten Commandments, just as a similar resolution in favour of Mother or Santa Claus would have received a resounding affirmative vote. Mark, it was not a law that was voted on, it was a resolution, which does no more than express the prevailing sentiment of the House and has no binding force in law. I suppose if the Alabama Supreme Court bans the judge's plaque, he'll move on to the mighty United States Supreme Court. And there, it's inconceivable that the court would vote in the judge's favour. But it's not gone so far and, at the moment, the judge keeps his wooden carving on display.

So, outside Alabama, what else is troubling or engaging the republic? First I should say is something so massive and so horrendous that radio, even print, cannot begin to impress it on a listener or a reader; even television, watching it in the comfort of your own home. It is a calamity one can only grieve over helplessly at a distance.

I'm talking about the flooding of the Ohio River, along – just measure this against a map of Europe – along 800 miles, 370 counties, innumerable small towns and big cities in its path. Normally the flooding is confined to a 20-mile stretch, say, and we see pictures of people in row boats, paddling past their houses with the waters lapping over the step or the first-floor windows. But we've seen such sights as never before. Since we can do nothing but gasp and sympathise with the hundreds of thousands of people whose houses were once on the bank of a river and are now in or under the river, the only seemly thing to do is to move on.

There are two issues which have been harrowing and harrying and inflaming debate for years. They were doused in two days without any noticeable riots or even eulogies from the losers. One was the question which came up first no later than Ronald Reagan's first term, the question of term limits. Should there be a limit to how long you can serve as a Congressman or woman, or a Senator?

All sorts of limits were proposed: two terms, 12 years in the Senate, five terms, 10 years in the House were popular. The argument in favour was that incumbents get accustomed to the uses and abuses of the system and develop only one ambition, which is to get re-elected.

The argument against is that a set limit to service in either House would deprive Congress of experience. And would, in the last permitted term, produce a swarm, or flock, or waddle of lame ducks. The other day the House solidly killed the proposal for any change. And men who'd spent most of the 1990s campaigning and speechifying and elbow-twisting for this single cause turned overnight into crusaders against school vouchers, environmental pollution, the drug trade, same sex marriages... you name it.

Even more astonishing in the casualness, the lack of emotion with which it was disposed of was the Senate's defeat of the greatly touted, the thundering cause of a Constitutional amendment for a balanced budget. Listeners new to this idea might like to have it put, as they say in Washington, solidly on the line.

Since no later than the election of President Bush, which was 1988, this has been the favourite crusade of the Republican Party. Before Mr Bush, Ronald Reagan when he was campaigning for president gave a firm promise to balance the budget in, I think it was, three years. Three years later, the budget was so way out of kilter that even the Republicans stopped setting off fire alarms and waited another four years till Mr Clinton came in.

And ever since, even though in his time the deficit has shrunk by about 30%, the Republicans have slogged away, day in and day out, swearing to pass one thing, an amendment to the Constitution which requires – mandates, as they like to say – a balanced budget.

Critics of the idea have always said this is about as wishful as voting for an amendment to guarantee permanent prosperity. Well, in the Senate, it came down to a split vote. Everything depended on one Democrat, unknown to fame until then, who had indicated he was in favour. Jubilation among the Republicans. On the eve of the vote, he changed his mind and, speaking as a penitent, appeared on national television, well at least on say 50 stations, saying he'd searched his conscience and decided that such an amendment would, in bad times, require cuts in the only prosperous fund, the only sacrosanct institution in federal law, the Social Security Act.

Loud applause from everybody over 65 who gets a monthly cheque. And even from the baby-boomers coming into their late 40s who expect, 20 years from now, to get their cheque.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.