Freedom of Speech is on the March...Off a Cliff

The politically correct thought police is having a banner week. First, British historian David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison in Austria after pleading guilty to charges of denying the Holocaust. While Irving's point of view is wrong and down right offensive, the thought of someone going to prison over this is quite shocking. That's something you expect in countries like North Korea, Iran, China, Cuba or Syria but not Austria.

The politically correct thought police also won a victory in Boston this week as Harvard President Lawrence Summers was forced to resign, after he remained under constant fire from left wing wacko professors in the Arts and Sciences faculty since last year after he made comments that innate gender differences may explain why there's more men than women in the science and math fields. I generally try to refrain from name calling in my posts, but left wing wackos is the only way to describe these professors who believe that Summers is unfit to be the President of Harvard only because he has a different (i.e., conservative) point of view. I think this intolerance to alternative viewpoints really meshes well with the idea of academic freedom and academic exploration that's suppose to take place at college campuses. Left-wing attorney and Harvard graduate Alan Dershowitz has an excellent editorial in the Boston Globe on resignation of Summers.

When you add these two stories along with most newspapers refusing to run the controversial Danish political cartoons of Mohammed, it makes me wonder if we've become increasingly intolerant of free speech.