Defending Don Imus

I am still surprised at how few people defended Don Imus. Here is the original complaint about him. All he said was that the Rutgers players looked like hos. The context was that he watched the Rutgers-Tennessee girls basketball championship, and commented that the winning Tennessee team was cute while the Rutgers girls had tatoos and were "rough". I don't see why he was either racist or sexist, as he was merely expressing a sports fan's preference for one team of black girls over another.

This law blog reports that the European Union is criminalizing "condoning, denying or grossly trivialising crimes of genocide". Even academic historians can get into trouble. The policy seems self-defeating to me -- I tend to discount any story when the contrary point of view is forbidden. I also think that free speech should allow you to trivialize whatever you want to trivialize.

George writes:

What makes Imus a racist and a sexist is that he is a white man.

It is racist and sexist to punish a white man for things that others could say with approval.