How Free is Your Speech?

The New York Times reports that editor-in-chief of the Colorado State campus newspaper is being asked to resign for referring to President Bush with a certain four-letter word. The editor wrote this opinion article in support of the young man that was tasered at the University of Florida. The main concern in this case is what constitutes vulgarity, and what is free.

So, you need to ask yourself; is vulgarity protected under freedom of speech and press? In this case the editor will probably be fired because there is a policy that campus publication can not use vulgarity in their opinion columns. But how do you define vulgarity, and is this really that bad? You may argue that a college campus should be mature enough to handle this kind of language. This may be true, but children would probably have access to this paper also. Even so, you could argue that this isn't anything worse than what these kids could see in movie or on television. Obvious, this is a very complex subject, and certain one that I am not equipped to answer. However, I see this as a potential rallying point of a new generation. It will, no doubt, take more than one four-letter word in a college newspaper to bring about social change, but everything has to start somewhere, right?