The limits of tolerance and free speech were tested last week in both Washington, D.C., and Hermon, Maine.

In Washington, NPR fired long-time commentator Juan Williams for remarks he made on “The O’Reilly Factor,” a conservative TV talk show.

In Hermon, a 17-year-old student was expelled for an expletive-laced rap song about his high school.

Both cases show an unsettling tendency for us to mercilessly punish people for expressing stupid or unpopular opinions.

In Hermon, Trevor Moore posted a song on a social networking site satirizing a rap song by Eminem.

Moore named the school superintendent and an assistant principal, and he used the same sort of threatening and offensive rhetoric that is common in rap music. That is, after all, the nature of satire.

“I’m sick of this place, and everything in it. So are you, you wanna burn it down, now [expletive deleted] admit it.”

In expelling Moore, Hermon High Principal Brian Walsh defined the problem as a school safety issue.

For his part, Moore told the Bangor Daily News he had no intention of setting fire to the school or hurting anyone.

In the wake of school shootings and bullying incidents across the country, Walsh was correct to swiftly remove Moore from the school.

Yet there should be some way of determining his true intent short of ending his high school career and severely limiting his future.

How about a two-week suspension and some mandatory sessions with a psychologist?

Seventeen-year-olds can do some pretty stupid things, and they should be held responsible for them. But the punishment in this case does not fit the crime.

Ditto for the firing of the usually mild-mannered NPR commentator Williams, whose sin was revealing his inner fears.

Anytime you find yourself starting a sentence with the words “I’m not a bigot, but …” it’s probably time to bite your tongue.

Williams didn’t.

“… when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

NPR deemed the comments anti-Muslim and “undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR.”

Yet we wonder who among us is so pure, so free from racial stereotyping, that these sorts of thoughts don’t flicker across our minds from time to time.

And hasn’t Williams, over a 30-year career in reporting and writing books about the civil rights movement, earned enough credibility to counter a single gaff?

NPR could have simply distanced itself from the remarks, explaining that his opinions are his own.

Instead, it decided to fire him, opening itself up to complaints of a liberal bias and launching a renewed conservative attempt to cut off its federal funding.

For a country that prides itself on free speech, it is disturbing how swift we have become to punish people who violate what seems to be an ever-expanding list of taboo subjects.

Free expression goes hand in hand with a free society. When we limit what people can say, we have a chilling effect on everyone’s freedom.

editorialboard@sunjournal.com

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