Let Coulter Be Coulter

CANCELING COULTER. It's been announced that Ann Coulter's appearance on Tuesday's Today Show to promote her new book was canceled. That's a bad idea. It was also a bad idea for Media Matters to launch a campaign against Coulter's television appearance. Keeping Coulter out of the public eye is bad political morality and bad politics. If anything, sensible people on the left should be trying to make Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh even more prominent than they are now.

Why is an embargo on Ann Coulter bad political morality?

One word: censorship.

Whether we on the left like it or not, Ann Coulter is a major figure in American society. She also makes her living primarily as a writer and promotes her books through media appearances and interviews. Coulter is best known for her television appearances, but she also gives interviews to talk radio and magazines and does speeches at universities and mega-churches. Preventing Coulter from making public appearances in venues that would otherwise welcome her is a form of censorship. As John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty, freedom of thought involves promoting ideas as well as publishing them. By seeking to prevent Coulter from appearing on Today, Media Matters was circumscribing her ability to promote her ideas, limiting the discussion of her ideas in the public realm, and thereby censoring her.

Given that censorship is bad political morality in any kind of free society, Media Matters is morally wrong in their effort to get NBC to cancel Coulter's appearance.

WORTH HER WEIGHT IN GOLD. It's also important to emphasize that keeping Coulter off the Today show is bad politics. In many ways, Ann Coulter is the most recognizable face of movement conservatism in the United States. Where conservative celebrities like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly all live in their own version of right-wing caves, Coulter is out in the world mesmerizing audiences with her daring defiance of contemporary political morality, i.e., "political correctness." Where Limbaugh et al., gingerly venture over the line into racism, homophobia, and misogyny, Coulter goes all in by arguing that women shouldn't have the right to vote, calling John Edwards and Al Gore explicatives for being gay, and calling African-Americans everything but the n-word.

This is why the left hardly has a better friend than Ann Coulter. Coulter is the telegenic face of conservative hatred of black people, gays, women, Hispanics, Jews, and women. Not that the non-white, non-male, and non-Christian population hasn't already gotten the message, but Coulter is a constant and especially prominent reminder that the Republican Party is the party of social bigotry in the United States.

In other words, Ann Coulter is worth her weight in gold to the left. If anything, Media Matters and Huffington Post should be booking more shows for Coulter rather than keeping her from appearing on already scheduled programs.

So, let Coulter be Coulter. It's the right thing to do and it's good liberal politics.