Jay Ambrose: The ups and downs of free speech

Leftists are killing free speech by calling disagreements hate speech and finding ways to intimidate even those who facilitate debate. But one victim recently fought back, showing us some Americans will stand up for a principle giving truth a chance to emerge. Mark Stevens, I think, is someone to emulate.

Stevens is a smart, tough guy from Queens. His father died when he was 17, leaving the family $84, an amount challenging the youth's initiative. All Stevens wanted was a chance. This country provided him with plenty, and today he is head of a hugely successful marketing firm, MSCO Inc. It advertises all over the place, including on the Rush Limbaugh radio show in New York.

It's because of that sponsorship that Stevens encountered the anti-speech "terrorists," a word he used in an interview with me in Colorado Springs. He was there to speak at a gathering of conservative think tanks about events after Limbaugh employed a nasty name to describe a woman involved in a public issue he had been discussing. It was an inexcusable slur, and Stevens hardly approved, but did not expect what would then come his way.

It was indeed an attack of crazies, people threatening Stevens with "surveillance," promising busloads of visits to his residence if he did not drop his advertising, telling even the female employees who answered the phone that they were "women haters."

Stevens pushed back, recognizing from the similarities that this was an organized hit. He went on the Limbaugh show and Fox News shows to denounce these thugs, increased his advertising and found great support in thousands of emails, faithful clients and even people volunteering to protect him.

I guess those trying to scare Stevens into hiding expected a mouse. They got a lion, but in cases of this kind, there are plenty of mice out there, such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Kraft Foods, McDonald's and Wendy's. Those are some of the companies that abandoned their membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council after extreme leftist groups emitted screeches about its support of such measures as stand-your-ground laws that permit self-defense when someone is trying to kill you.

What the council mostly likes as it effectively lobbies state legislatures is free enterprise, economic growth and jobs, but the left wants government control and portrays the organization in vicious terms.

Meanwhile, more tyranny loyalists have been on the march in the case of Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp. and its Fox News in America. In Great Britain, Labour Party members on a parliamentary committee denounced him as unfit to head a multinational news corporation. Hey, says Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, this means the Federal Communications Commission should revoke Fox's broadcast licenses, another anti-freedom absurdity of extreme leftist making.

At least we are not Denmark, where Lars Hedegaard, head of the Danish Free Press Society, was put on trial for saying in a private exchange that there were a disturbing number of cases of misogyny and family rape in some Muslim areas. In three different court decisions, he was found innocent, then guilty, then in late April finally innocent again of hate speech, for which he could have been imprisoned. Even if he had meant to make his observations public, so what? People cannot talk about such things even if they are true? Somebody's feelings might be hurt? What about stopping rapes?

Free speech evolved slowly and very, very painfully in the West. Even in America, where it has taken its greatest leaps forward, it has had continuous ups and downs, although we seemed to have arrived at some understanding that this is a supreme freedom without which there is vastly reduced hope for the others. Lately, people who like to call themselves progressives have been playing a frighteningly regressive game with this freedom, but there remains a great hope in America: citizens like Mark Stevens.

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Jay Ambrose: The ups and downs of free speech