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Let’s go back to our friendly moderator on NPR. In his structuring of the discussion on the “proper” limits on themes to presented in school plays he establishes an implicit equivalence between constitutionally right to engage in free speech and other people’s “right” not to be offended or disturbed by what they see on stage.

But guess what? No such equivalency exists. While we all wish to lead our private lives in a way that minimizes incidents of gratuitous offense to those around us, the founders could not have been clearer about the fact that in the public square this concern about fellow citizens suffering “moral offense” was definitively subordinate to the goal of guaranteeing the vigorous and unfettered flow of provocative and challenging thought.

So why did this reporter, like so many of his colleagues in the business, build the discussion around this implied equivalence?

My guess is that it is because he came of professional age during the last three decades, a time when the ideological operatives of the Right made crystal clear that they will work overtime to controversialize any and all points of view they see as affirming the core principles of the Left, even when, or perhaps especially when, as in the case above, no serious intellectual case could ever be made about the two postures having equivalent claims on the public mind within our Republic of Laws.