HREI: Don’t ignore the details

Jeanette Laster and the illustrious Human Rights Education Institute rise again to offer us yet another interesting thought exercise.

This time, Ms. Laster’s studied position on a matter of speech is that an organization to which she ostensibly objects has “carelessly shared nationally” information regarding a controversy involving parents, children and school counselors.

Without an apparent sense of incongruity, she appears to object only to the sharing of details of the controversy, not to the details of the controversy which are themselves centered on the perceived propriety of the time and place of the sharing of particular information.

Issuing from the same person that brought you the rhetoric of certain speech having “no place” somewhere, her latest — comically ironic — statement should prove profoundly amusing to those with so much as a passing familiarity with the First Amendment.

Time and place restrictions on speech being what they are, who does Ms. Laster recommend we engage to determine what speech has a place somewhere and subsequently what the terms for the “careful sharing” of that information would be?

Quis custodiet ipso custodes?

JOE ALLANMEYER

Coeur d’Alene