Start the Dialogue

The story of the three girls who said the word vagina has spiraled beyond the sane minds that originally drafted it. Beginning with the absurdity of a decision and propelled by the booming madness of a mob, the episode has taught me, among other things, the power of spoken words, and the power of the individual to precipitate a storm. I do not believe that the administration was villainous. However, I do now believe that it is only with negative press that justice will be reconsidered.

The pertinent question is, To what extent does John Jay High School retain the obligation to shield its community members from uncomfortable subject matter? According to Hazelwood School District et al. v. Kuhlmeier, "a school must be able to take into account the emotional maturity of the intended audience in determining whether to disseminate student speech on potentially sensitive topics." What does this mean?

Importantly, it is not important (necessarily) that the word is “vagina,” and that the word ought not to be associated with badness and impurity or that believing that it should is degrading and the social expression of thousands of years of female subjugation. I happen to believe these things are true; However, parents in our community can believe otherwise. Indeed, these parents, so long as their children are legally theirs, have the right to inculcate ignorance, and it is illiberal to say otherwise.

The real issue is that as a school, John Jay has the educational imperative for diversity. Importantly, adamantly, is this: just because someone feels uncomfortable by the sexual politics of the Monologue, it does not mean that he is entitled to censor it. Because that would mean the end of education. How would I know what I believe, if I were not exposed to that which I did not believe? How would I know the bounds of my own civility, if I were never made to feel uncomfortable.

As a liberal society, we place the right over the good. Meaning, we establish a sense of justice, what is right, without mandating how that right can be exercised: We say speech should be free, but we do not say what that speech should entail; We say thoughts should be unfettered, but we do not say what those thoughts should entail. Likewise, one of the foundations of our society is the principle that institutions cannot coerce individuals into opinions. In this case, our school cannot force a breed of sexual politics onto a helpless community and – and this, I believe, is of tremendous importance – the community cannot in turn corrupt the educational environ of the night by forcing its breed of sexual politics onto the school.

The nature of words, of an Open Mic Night with minds sentient and free, facilitates this medium, where neither the school nor the community has ultimate domain. Words are non-coercive. Just because someone hears something that they do not like, (say) a monologue about the vagina, does not mean they have been coerced. It does not mean that the school is imposing its sense of good onto the community. However, by censoring that word, the community is imposing, in a very explicitly and coercive way, its sense of good onto the school system, and onto me and those three girls and onto everyone in the room.

And that is the line where censorship is violated. At an open Mic Night, the individuals in the room have tacitly renounced their right as minors to be shielded from the entirely comfortable. They have affirmed that they can discern ideas from each other, from that which they do support from that which they do not, and, resoundingly, that they will take up the challenge of a liberal education: to determine for oneself what one believes.