Randa Jarrar's Speech Needs to Be Free, As Awful As It Is

California State University professor Randa Jarrar’s needlessly antagonistic and quite frankly evil attack on First Lady Barbara Bush within hours of her passing has raised a variety of questions about the role of free speech in our society. Is it permissible to discipline someone at work for things they say on their personal time no matter how awful they may be?

On Monday, I suggested that there is tension between wanting to condemn something that is clearly wrong such as the vitriol spread by Jarrar while simultaneously supporting her personal right to free speech which is indeed the right of every American.

Traditionally, we have seen people on the right defending the free speech of conservative speakers such as Ben Shapiro when they have been threatened before campus events, and we have seen people on the left arguing that he should not be allowed to present. Now, the tables have almost turned. People on the right seem to be more interested in the firing and effective silencing of Jarrar while people on the left have suddenly become champions of freedom of speech.

I also argued on Monday that we have to try to separate our own personal emotions from this issue and view the principle of free speech in and of itself rather than our opinions of certain ways it has been exercised.

Jarrar is an educator. Her job is to teach creative writing to the students of California State University Fresno. This series of ill-advised tweets does not necessarily do anything to impact her ability to fulfill those responsibilities.

As a brief caveat to this, it is quite possible that there is a code of conduct in place that provides expectations for faculty members outside the classroom. I tried to search a little bit on the University website, and I couldn’t find anything, but if there is the expectation that faculty members conduct themselves as professionals both inside and outside the classroom, then there may be a case for violating the job responsibilities of a professor. We all sign on to a certain code of conduct when we are employed, so there is a possibility that her speech would violate some condition of her employment. I do not know enough to speak to that. If someone knows more than I do, message me, and I can update this paragraph.

However, if it is true that she did not violate the code of conduct or any conditions of her employment, then it is very hard to justify firing her as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, the downside of free speech is that we sometimes have to hear things we don’t like, and we have to hear things that are indeed evil. However, the benefits of free speech are incredible and something that we ought not trade away even though it does sometimes make us uncomfortable.

At the end of the day, I think there are plenty of things that can and should be done in the situation. We will talk about that on Friday. However, it is a very dangerous world we move into if personal speech that does not violate any employer’s code of conduct or interfere with the performance of a particular job is used as a justification for firing an employee from that job.

Discussing Randa Jarrar's Venomous Use of Free Speech

As I sat watching the funeral of First Lady Barbara Bush, I couldn’t help but feel somewhat bad that her funeral had somewhat been overshadowed by the controversy generated by one of her vocal critics. California State University Fresno professor Randa Jarrar tweeted, among other things, in light of Bush’s passing, “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal.”

As you very well might know, or at least can imagine, this did not go over very well. In fact, even though she is a professor with tenure, it appears that Fresno president Joseph Castro may be considering disciplinary action after he said, “A professor with tenure does not have blanket protection to say and do what they wish. We are all held accountable for our actions.”

This, of course, raises an interesting question for someone like me who has written multiple times on the importance of free speech. Jarrar clearly has no taste, and she clearly is a heartless individual who was just looking for an opportunity to take a cheap shot and get some shock publicity in the style of Kathy Griffin. That pretty much goes without saying, and, given the outrage that we have seen from across the political spectrum, I think that a lot of people would agree with this assessment of her character.

That being said, I cannot and should not deny that she has free speech. She can say awful things if she wants to. It would not be right if she threatened to restrict my speech, so I should not threaten to advocate for policies that would restrict hers as a private individual (I am in no position to put such policies into place anyway, but just to be clear, I do not think that, as a private individual, her speech should be restricted no matter how evil it is).

Now, with both of these realities established, we have to return to the question of the discipline that has been threatened by Fresno. Is it appropriate to discipline someone at work for their opinions that they express in their personal time?

This gets into some sensitive areas without a doubt because I think that we often make laundry list of things that we wish people wouldn’t say and would quite frankly feel uncomfortable if our coworkers said. Just to be entirely clear, this has never happened, but if I was working with someone who said that he or she wished that all Christians were wiped off the face of the earth, I would be uncomfortable. If I was in the room with Peter Singer as he advocated for the euthanasia of children born with disabilities, I would be uncomfortable.

However, as we come to this issue of free speech in the context of Randa Jarrar, we have to do our best to separate emotion from this discussion and separate our own personal discomfort from the principle of the matter. As distasteful as I may find Jarrar’s comments, the principle of free speech is something that we have to handle very carefully and not just emotionally respond. I’m going to try to do that for you this week.

Remaining Thankful through the Dark Times

Noah ultimately was thankful for God’s provision as the end result of being faithful. At the end of the day, we have been talking about how important it is to remain faithful to God despite the fact that the world may not understand or maybe very countercultural. We have to remain faithful even though it may seem that evil is more profitable in the short-term.

I think that sometimes we forget this final step in the process. We might be living in an evil times, and we might even stand strong to resist the temptation towards evil. At the end of the day though, we need to remember that thankfulness and gratefulness have to be in our hearts. Look at what happened when Noah left the ark.

“Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it” (Genesis 8:20, NIV).

We need to have the same attitude of being thankful when we have come through such evil times and difficult trials. After all, it would be much easier to just throw up our hands and say that everything was for nothing. I find it is much easier to be ungrateful than it is to be grateful. Even though Noah had been providentially saved, I have a feeling he probably could have found plenty of things to be upset about after spending all that time in the boat. He could have been bitter about why God did what He did.

However, at the end of the day he made the choice to be thankful. This reflects back on the proper view of who God is and what God does. We can be bitter about having to live in such horrible times. Noah easily could have rejected God for having him live in such a time that he had to witness so much evil before his ultimate deliverance. He could have been upset about having to deal with the inconvenience of ridicule. He could have been upset about presumably having to put his entire life on hold in order to build a giant boat.

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, he remained thankful. He continued to follow God (albeit imperfectly as we will soon find out), but we find him listed later in Hebrews in what has been called the Hall of Fame of faith.

I don’t know that the days we live in are as bad as the days of Noah. They are pretty bad, and there’s plenty of evil to go around, but I really don’t know how I could ever compare which days are more evil. The point that we need to remember is that living in an evil time does not give us the excuse to be evil, we need to remain faithful and we need to be thankful at the end of the day. If we do these three things, I think that will help us stay on the right track which is of course God’s path for us.

Standing against the Culture like Noah Did

As we think about the time of Noah in comparison to the world of today, we have to remember that, despite the fallenness of the world around him, Noah was faithful. God told him to do something that was pretty radical. In a world that had never experienced rain, he was being asked to build a boat. They would seemingly be no reason to do such a thing. All prior experience would have led know what to believe that there was going to be no flood. After all, nothing like that had ever happened before. However, all that we hear about Noah’s response is really all that is important.

“Noah did everything just as God commanded him” (Genesis 6:22, NIV).

It can be tempting to compromise our principles in a world that is going crazy. After all, if everybody else is doing it, we sometimes think that it is okay for us to do it too. If it seems to work for them and they don’t really seem to be any consequences bad actions, it is easy for us to lose our resolve and compromise. After all, as we spoke about on Monday, our human propensity toward doing that which is wrong and rebelling against God has not changed.

I spoke about Syria on Monday. I wrote about how it was horrendous to see the abuse of power evident when a dictator releases chemical weapons on his own people, including nonmilitary civilians and children. The wrong conclusion to draw from that type of action is that it is suddenly okay for other world leaders to be doing the same thing to their people. After all, if Syria can do it, why can’t another country do it?

The right conclusion to draw from this tragic event is that, regardless of how you feel about the action taken by the United States, England and France intervening in this situation, using chemical weapons on your own people is objectively wrong. There are of course, in any conflict, casualties expected, and weapons of various types are going to be used. However, watching children and other civilians as the victims of such attacks is something that I believe we can agree on as evil.

I think the circles back to my previous point. We want to make sure that we do not do that which is evil just because other people may be doing it. We want to do as God commands whether or not it appears profitable, popular or socially acceptable. Like Noah, we need to hold on to our righteousness because it is important, and doing what God commands is what we ought to actually spend our time on.

It may look crazy, and people may not understand. The choices we make maybe incredibly countercultural. They might even be to our disadvantage in the eyes of the world, but, it is important to do what God says right away. After all, if Noah thought that he could wait a few years before beginning construction on his vessel, it would have been too late. Following God needs to happen all the time.

Human Nature Has Not Changed since the Days of Noah

As we sit here in the midst of an extraordinarily rainy spring time in Vermont, I know that I have the assurance this rain is going to stop at some point. We are not going to see our world destroyed by a flood as it was in the days of Noah. That being said though, this meteorological event has got me thinking about all of the ways that our current time indeed parallels the world in the time of Noah.

Scripture asserts that in the times of Noah, there was nothing good and quite literally no redeeming qualities in the human race. “The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5, NIV).

Clearly, the problem of evil and sin is still at work in our culture. We have this tendency to rebel against what God would have us to do, and as evidenced by the world in the time of Noah, that was not acceptable.

I was thinking about this in the context of the current world situation with the Syrian dictator using chemical weapons on his own civilians. Obviously he is not the first political leader to abuse his position in such an egregious way, and I am certain that he will not be the last. However, that does not excuse the horrendous violation of the trust that the people of Syria ought to be able to have in their leader. They ought to be able to trust that chemical weapons are not going to be used on civilians, and the violation of that trust is about as evil as it possibly can be.

I think this is somewhat what is being talked about when Moses wrote about the inclinations of the human heart always being towards evil. It is not just that people were violating the commandments of God incidentally, but they were violating them in such frequent and terrible ways that they had reached the point of no return.

The lesson in this situation seems to be rather clear than for all of us who are in a society that seems to be falling apart at the seams. I think there is a good case to be made that many of the inclinations of the human heart are still pointing towards evil in a great number of situations. Thinking beyond just the situation in Syria, it can happen on a much more local level as well. We don’t have to be talking about an international incident to see the evil of the violation of free will at heart. We take a good gift and abuse it for the wrong purposes.

As a result, when we start to think about the days of Noah in relation to our own times, the problem of the heart has not changed. There is still a severe problem with our nature, and we still do terrible things to each other. A lot has changed since the time of Noah, but that fact has not.