Letter Endorsing Secret Court is Hate Speech

To the editors:

Like, I imagine, many of my fellow students at the College, I was quite taken aback by the letter from Gladden J. Pappin ’04 (Letters, “Secret Court Rightly Punished Immorality,” Dec. 9). There’s little question that he is in the extreme minority at Harvard in his views. However, I was somewhat disheartened to see a debate spring up on my House open list (as I imagine it may have on many lists) in which the consensus seemed to be, “What can you do, it’s free speech?”

It doesn’t surprise me that many will feel the need to defend Pappin’s right to have written the letter. Nor will I for a moment deny it. What concerns me is that in such a conversation a crucial point will be lost: his letter was unequivocally hate speech, and it is massively important to identify it as such. And it wasn’t merely hateful—it was purposefully vitriolic and designed to anger the many who do not share his bigoted beliefs.

Imagine that Pappin had advocated the expulsion of African-Americans from the College—or Jews, or Muslims, or women—and grounded his argument in hateful racist, ethnic or sexist stereotypes. If this had been the case, I question not only whether people’s response to the letter would have been the same, but whether The Crimson would have published such a piece at all. The problem is that homophobia—of which Pappin’s letter is a particularly insidious example—is not being put on the same platform as racism, anti-Semitism or other equally disgusting forms of hate; to diminish it thus is both ignorant and incredibly dangerous, as the secret court of 1920 showed us in the first place.

I don’t necessarily think The Crimson shouldn’t have published his letter, and by all means Pappin has the right to both think and say what he believes. But he is supporting, if not explicitly advocating, the expulsion of students based on sexual orientation, loud and clear. Call his letter what it is. It isn’t a position in a debate on morality. It’s hate speech.

Ian R. MacKenzie '04

Dec. 10, 2002