Kurt Anderson at New York Magazine says, Who cares if the meany weirdo president of Iran came and spoke at Columbia?  So what?  As Roland says to his comrades-in-arms in The Song of Roland, What are you, a bunch of sissies? 

For a while now, I’ve fretted that we’re turning into a nation of weenies and permanently enraged censors, that too many of us are afraid of letting disagreeable or uncomfortable ideas into the limelight. If it’s not the p.c. overreach of campus “speech codes” or the attempts to criminalize “hate speech,” it’s the FCC’s crackdown on cussing in PBS documentaries and the Secret Service’s keeping protesters fenced off in “free speech zones.” But during the last month, this impulse to squelch-indulged by the left and the right and the milquetoast middle-seems to have reached some kind of tipping point, as if we’ve entered a permanent state of hysterical overreaction.

This is a good read, and my contrary nature wants to agree.  But it’s not that easy.  We live in a pluralist society, and one thing we don’t really like to discuss is that each worldview within that culture really claims supremacy to itself, as in “I believe X, and you believe Y, and they believe Z, and you can keep believing in Y and Z, but it’s really X that makes all that possible, so X is really the driving worldview of the culture…”  And X doesn’t like it when This happens, and Y doesn’t like it when That happens, and Z doesn’t like it when The Other Thing happens.  And all this means that somebody is complaining all the time about something, which makes it sound like we’re a nation of complainers.  And maybe we are.  But the bigger issue is, Whose culture is it?  

HT: AL DAILY