Kaitlin Nootbaar, Oklahoma High School Valedictorian, Denied Diploma For Using ‘Hell’ In Speech (Huffington Post)

A few weeks ago, when Mitt Romney made his big foreign trip in support of his presidential campaign, one of the stops he made was at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Poland. On his way to his car after the visit, nearby reporters shouted questions at him, asking him if he was concerned about the numerous gaffes he’d made during the trip. For the Romney campaign, this was a free kick they desperately needed; after a trip that really hadn’t gone well for them, the press clearly overstepped its bounds by pestering Romney, in a really obnoxious way, while he was returning from a deeply moving historical site. All his press secretary who was with him at the time, Rick Gorka, had to do was chide the reporters for being so rude, and not only would the Romney campaign look like they’d done this noble thing, but it would be a wonderful clip to play to right-wingers to show exactly why “the liberal media” is so evil and you can’t trust them or even talk to them. Unfortunately, as Rachel Maddow pointed out in her coverage of this incident, the Romney campaign completely lost the high ground when Gorka, while rightly chastising the reporters, blurted out the phrase “Kiss my ass” at one of them (skip to 2:40):

I bring this up not because of the story itself, but the way in which it was covered. In all the television coverage I saw of this story the word “ass” was bleeped out, even on Rachel Maddow’s prime time show on cable. It’s the year 2012, and I’m pretty sure that apart from Christian networks and Sesame Street, pretty much everywhere else the word “ass” isn’t all that verboten any longer. My response to hearing those bleeps was along the lines of “Are you kidding me,” although a stronger word than “kidding” went through my mind.

“Dirty words” have always been of interest to me. I mentioned recently that I grew up in a family of George Carlin fans, so I was exposed to his “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” at a very early age. Listening to rap music in the 1980s certainly introduced me to many more words of that nature, and like most children I experimented with them growing up, getting myself into lots of trouble. I think I took longer than most people to grow out of that phase; it didn’t help that I had so much work writing about professional wrestling during its late 1990s boom, when the word “ass” was being thrown around so gratuitously. Going back to college and getting so deep into rhetoric studies kind of weaned me off of that habit, and after I graduated in 2006 I made it a point to stop swearing on the .org because I wanted to present a more professional appearance to prospective employers. Honestly I still felt like the taboo over “dirty words” was silly and based in the far right’s asinine attempts to make us all conform to their moral codes, but that view still holds a great deal of sway in our culture, and I didn’t want to disqualify myself from any potential jobs over a few f-bombs on my site. As I mentioned after The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon got shortlisted for the Dundee, though, promoting the book will mean talking about sexual topics in a way that kind of necessitates me using those words again, albeit in a much less gratuitous way than I used to.

In just the past couple of weeks the whole “dirty word” issue has come up a couple of times here on the .org. When I wrote in support of the imprisoned Russian punk group Pussy Riot it was kind of necessary to use the group’s name; not only would altering it make the blog harder (and likely too comical) to read, but as so much of the blog revolved around free speech, I felt compelled to use the “dirty word” to help prove some of my points. Besides, using those words in direct quotations, like the Gorka example above, is usually considered more acceptable because you’re repeating someone else’s words verbatim and not applying them to your own ideas. Similarly, my first use of the New Jerseyism “Fuckin’ A” in my post about New Jersey’s Governor, Chris Christie, giving the keynote speech at the upcoming Republican National Convention was also in that line, but then I used it again to close the piece in a way that, though I felt it tied the blog together in a humourous way, wasn’t entirely necessary. I took the risk of offending people there because I thought others would appreciate the rhetorical flourish it provided at the end. Judging what I can get away with here in terms of “dirty words” is hardly an easy process given all the aspects of my career I’m trying to balance.

It doesn’t help that definitions of acceptable and unacceptable use of “dirty words” continues to shift so much. What struck me so much about censoring Rick Gorka saying “ass” was that a few years back, when then-President George W. Bush was caught saying the word “shit” to Tony Blair at a conference, I remember that CNN aired the video uncensored (albeit with a warning beforehand) and I don’t know of anyone who thinks “shit” is less (or even equally as) offencive as “ass.” Bleeping Gorka made it seem like we were taking a step backward in terms of what was acceptable, and censoring “ass” in prime time on cable, especially on a news show where the use of the word was kind of the crux of the story, seemed a bridge too far to me.

The Kaitlin Nootbaar case is about thirty bridges too far. Granted that “hell” has an overtly religious dimension to it that most of the other “dirty words” don’t, but we’ve been past shouting “go to the devil” at each other in this country for several generations. I’m not going to say people can’t find the word offencive, but denying a straight-A student her high school diploma over the use of the word is the kind of overreaction that defies belief. Some might argue that Nootbaar is overreacting in turn by refusing to write the apology her high school wants before it will release her diploma, but as a free speech advocate, and particularly seeing us appearing to backslide in terms of the acceptable use of “dirty words,” I have to applaud Nootbaar and hope that she stands her ground against her high school.

Professionally I have a deep interest in seeing this cultural shift to the right stopped in its tracks, simply because it’ll be much more difficult to sell The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon in a culture where “ass” and “hell” are suddenly scandalous again. Personally, as much as I’ve come to reduce my own use of “dirty words,” any kind of censorship discomforts me, and when right-wingers start to label (and make) more things unacceptable,  it’s hard not to worry about what else might follow. If we’re moving back to a culture where “ass” gets bleeped on prime time television and high schoolers get harsh punishments for saying “hell,” I don’t know what the **** I’m going to do.