Redneck Nation (20 page)

The purpose of the ordinance, in other words, was not to stop the transmission of the ideas but to protect the delicate sensibilities
of the hearer. Is free speech really worth letting folks get upset over? Why don’t you just sit down and have a julep—you’ll
feel better.

The St. Paul censorship code was so clearly unconstitutional that even some members of the U.S. Supreme Court noticed, and
it was overturned. But fear not, Redneck Nation, for the fight against free speech continues, and with an unusual ally: the
ACLU.

If you’ve seen the movie
Footloose
, you have my sympathy. But you probably recall how ridiculous the premise was: an American town in the modern era where rock
music and dancing were banned and teenagers actually paid attention to sermons on sinful music preached by a balding, middle-aged
pastor. The film is unwatchable for many reasons, not the least of which is that it’s simply impossible in these modern times
to imagine such a place in America.

Well, if
Footloose
seems beyond the pale, what to make of a state with a list of banned words, words you cannot speak publicly at work to any
person for any reason. Does it sound crazy? Does it sound ridiculous? Does it sound like… California?

In one of the most bizarre judicial rulings ever, the California State Supreme Court voted 4–3 to establish a list of banned
words. The ruling was the result of a lawsuit brought by a group of Hispanic workers claiming that their boss used racist
slurs and comments when talking to them. In upholding the damages, the court barred “any future use of a list of offensive
words in the workplace—even outside the presence of the [Latino employees] and even if welcome or overtly permitted.”

Worse, the ACLU, whose attitude toward our liberties is getting less civil every day, supported this overt, obvious, and intentional
violation of First Amendment freedoms. As civil libertarian Nat Hentoff noted at the time, “the ACLU of Northern California
submitted an amicus brief in enthusiastic support of this prior restraint of speech…. [The ACLU] has now allowed itself to
be gleefully cited by its opponents as agreeing that certain words can no longer be spoken in certain places before there
is clear evidence that any of those words has created discrimination in a particular instance or in a particular context.”

Making fun of the Old South for policing water fountains and checking who sat in which bus seat is easy. But it’s also history.
Right now the state of California has speech police patrolling workbenches and factory floors, listening for the “forbidden
words”—a real-life parody of an old George Carlin routine.

If you think I’m exaggerating about the speech police, you might want to chat with Janice Barton of Manistee, Michigan. The
speech police didn’t just catch her, they sentenced her to forty-five days in jail. According to the
Manistee Chronicle
, Barton was arrested, tried, and convicted
of the crime of telling her mother in a one-on-one conversation that “spics,” as she put it, ought to learn to speak English.
Now, this is hardly a noble sentiment, but is it a crime?

The comment, spoken in a crowded restaurant, was overheard by an off-duty deputy sheriff who took down Barton’s license plate
when she left. In October 1998, Barton was charged with violating a city ordinance against “insulting conduct in a public
place.” The actual law reads like it was written by my grandmother to be read immediately before Sunday dinner. “No person
shall engage in any indecent, insulting, immoral or obscene conduct in any public place.” And clean your plate, too.

Towns all over Michigan have nearly identical laws, it should be noted. It should be further noted that all of these incidents
of outrageous limits on personal liberty are occurring in the very heart of traditional American Northernism.

California, Minnesota, Michigan—these are all bastions of progressivism, leaders in what we Southerners viewed as Yankee agitation.
These stories are not isolated incidents from oddball locales like Ottumwa, Iowa, or Moose River, Maine. Cass Sunstein is
a prominent member of the University of Chicago’s law school, where he wrote
Democracy and the PROBLEM of Free Speech
(emphasis added). His rejection of free speech as a near-absolute right was well received, not by far-right proto-Nazis,
but by his northern liberal allies who nearly all agree that as long as Rush Limbaugh makes more money than they do, there
is too much free speech in America.

The inevitable—in fact, the only—counterargument those who abandon free speech offer is that some speech
is too vile to be allowed. Racist taunts, screams of hateful anger, the music of Celine Dion—what value do these expressions
truly have, and what about all the harm they cause?

But even if we could agree that some expressions of free speech are too much for a society to bear, who gets to decide which
ones they are? Inevitably it’s the government that will decide, and these governments (as Mario Savio would surely tell you)
cannot be trusted. Imagine how happy George Wallace and Bull Connor would have been to have the power to suppress “hate-filled
speech” attacking the good Christian folk of the South and the honor of their heritage. They would have been more than happy
to distribute their list of “banned words” to every civil rights gathering in their home states.

“Ah, but, Michael, that’s the mistake you make with this Redneck Nation nonsense. Northerners don’t abuse power that way.
We Yankees wouldn’t suppress political speech or outlaw dissent. We truly are different from those Southerners you compare
us with. That stuff might have happened in Wilmington, North Carolina, but it wouldn’t in Waukesha, Wisconsin.”

Oh, really? From wire reports:

MILWAUKEE
—Robert Thompson, a resident of Waukesha County, Wisconsin, filed a lawsuit challenging a county ordinance preventing him
from passing out copies of The Bible and the U.S. Constitution in county parks.

Waukesha County Ordinance Chapter 20 prohibits public discussions on religion or politics within the county parks unless a
written permit from the county park and planning commission has first been granted….
The ordinance contains a flat ban on religious or political literature distribution in public parks
[emphasis added]. Violating the ordinance can result in fines and up to 90 days in jail.

This law, a direct, frontal assault on political speech, was the law of the land in an American city in 1999. Not 1899, but
on the cusp of the twenty-first century, and in a solid northern community in a solidly liberal state. Such a law in a southern
county in 1969 would have been viewed as proof of the oppression and backwardness of the South. How, my Yankee friend, should
we view it today?

Once the law was challenged, the good folks of Waukesha quickly saw they had a court case they couldn’t win and withdrew.
It is safe to assume, however, that similar laws still exist, and it is safer still to assume they’ll be found north—not south—of
the Mason-Dixon line. For that is the ultimate irony of all of these sad stories of modern redneckery: You already knew it.

As soon as you began reading this chapter about free speech, you knew what was coming. There are dozens—no, hundreds—of these
stories, and they all involve places like Berkeley and St. Paul and Chicago and Seattle, and they all confirm that the modern
enemy of free speech is comprised almost entirely of its old champions from the civil rights era.

If I say “racism,” you still say “South.” If I say “illiterate,” you still say “South.” But if the word association is
“censorship,” the natural choice is “North.” When the next Mario Savio appears, he will no doubt return to Berkeley to fight
for the cause of free speech.

This time, I doubt he’ll make it out alive.

I
t was the Tammy Wynette line that really hurt.

Every northern woman knows what a “Tammy Wynette” is—that downtrodden southern damsel trudging through Sam’s Wholesale Club,
a squirming toddler over her hip and a dark bruise under her eye. She’s the one trying to scrape together a week’s worth of
groceries from what’s left after paying the tab for her husband’s weekend drinking and his unexplained credit card charges
from a local motel. A “Tammy Wynette” is a helpless female, a perpetual victim, an unenlightened sister who has yet to add
the word “empowered” to her vocabulary.

This was the type of woman—the powerless, dependent, prototypically
southern
woman—that then-Mrs. Clinton denied being. She couched her denial in this language because she knew it would resonate with
women from Boston to the San Francisco Bay.

Working in politics as I have, I’ve had the opportunity to hear the way southern women, particularly the low-income and/or
religious women, are viewed by their northern sisters. Listening to northeastern liberals, one would think southern gals spend
their days clad in burkas awaiting their next caning. I remember listening to a conversation in Westchester County, New York,
in which a liberal, pro-abortion Republican was talking about her pro-life southern counterparts, and I couldn’t tell if she
thought they were victims of brainwashing or Vichy-style traitors to the feminist cause. After a particularly heated rant
about “telling me what to do with my body” and the lack of government-subsidized day care, she declared, “We wouldn’t put
up with that up here.”

And there it is: what southern women will put up with. Those poor, demure damsels, oppressed by southern culture,
utterly lacking in empowerment and unable to sing the “I Am Woman” anthem of the northern sisterhood. We’ve got to get these
women a subscription to
Cosmo
and access to the Oxygen channel—stat!

In northern eyes, there are two kinds of southern women: If they’re attractive and affluent, they’re vapid, sorority-girl
sellouts with big hair and bigger smiles, hanging off the arm of old money or nouveau riche manhood. If they’re poor and pudgy,
they’re political prisoners of the trailer park plantation, spending their days with Judge Judy and their nights with Miss
Cleo.

And either way, they’re much too fond of Elvis.

The defining characteristic of these redneck women is the relationship they have with men. Southern women, so the assumption
goes, are either helpless damsels, delicate and genteel, wholly dependent upon men for protection, or they are trailer trash,
desperate Paula Joneses who will put themselves through whatever humiliations are required to hold on to their wayward men.
A stereotypical southern woman either needs a man to rescue her or needs to be rescued from her man—depending on her economic
status.

I find the northern female’s contempt for the southern belle’s perceived weaknesses deliciously ironic, coming as it does
from a group of women who lack the strength to protect themselves from so much as an auto shop girlie calendar, an off-color
joke, or (as will be demonstrated) the works of Goya. If you are looking for erudite, academically minded women, then the
South will be slim pickin’s, I concede. But if you’re looking for strong, powerful women who have taught their men to answer
“How high?” when they say “Jump!” you gotta be whistlin’ Dixie.

I learned about southern womanhood the hard way, from broken hearts and sore backsides endured during a misspent youth devoted
to their pursuit and capture. There was Laurie, a blonde with a soft southern accent so smooth you could spread it on a biscuit,
who moved away and left me crushed in the fourth grade.

There was Georgia, a dark brunet whose every furtive classroom glance my senior year told me, “Not if you were the last breathing
biped on planet Earth, Graham.”

There was Wendy, a singer, an actress, a beauty pageant contestant, and the queen of her corner of Lexington County, South
Carolina. She was perhaps the last woman in America to be “courted” rather than dated, and Wendy’s father sometimes took a
system of valet parking to handle the crush of suitors awaiting an audience.

Christine was the embodiment of southern femininity: graceful, demure, and drop-dead gorgeous. We met at a state high school
band event, where she stole my heart. When I drove ninety minutes to North Augusta, to reclaim it, I was greeted by the embodiment
of southern fatherhood: imposing, inarticulate, and well armed.

In college, I dated a few women from up North, but the cultural chasm could not be bridged; not by love, or even the amazing
thing that one girl did with the cherry stem and the handcuffs. And so today, after minor mistakes, major disasters, and one
near-death experience, I have fulfilled my destiny as the husband of a true daughter of the Confederacy: my lovely bride,
the Warden.

If you have to ask why I call her the Warden, you know nothing of the species of womanhood indigenous
to the South. And the Warden is a Southerner, through and through. Born in Bennettsville, South Carolina (her mother was “Miss
Bennettsville High School”, the Warden grew up an only child—taking piano, riding horses, and learning the biblical command
that husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the church: He does all the suffering, while She builds lavish, ornate
buildings, dresses in expensive clothes, and advocates celibacy.