In Defense Of Morris Dees

On one level, I admired a reader's protest of the appearance of famed civil-rights attorney Morris Dees at Longwood University in January.

The reader wrote a letter of protest to Dr. Patricia Cormier, Longwood president. In the letter, he attacked Mr. Dees as being on the "far-left" and "anti-Christian" who opposed a judge placing the 10 Commandments in Alabama courts.

While I honor the reader for making his views known, he is wrong to protest this.

A university campus should be the haven of free speech and of as many diverse views as can be conceived. Get the opinions out front, then dissect, disagree or whatever with them, but don't try to hang the speakers ahead of time.

Yes, I am a child of the 1960s. Yes, I am a graduate of the first interracial college in the American South (Berea in Kentucky). I grew up in an era when free speech also was under attack across America. And I have grown older in a society that moved from that tyranny to one of much greater magnitude. On the left, we have the Political Correctness crowd that is ready to hang anyone who says anything with which they disagree. On the right, we have ideologues who want muzzle people like Mr. Dees.

They both are wrong. Instead of going after the ideas, the speakers themselves are attacked.

Just as an aside here, Morris Dees and others were more than correct to oppose the Alabama courts placing the 10 Commandments in the courthouses. If that grand document is placed there, the fine people of Alabama and elsewhere better be prepared to place the Torah and other religious documents on display. They better be prepared, too, to dispense with the constitutional value known as separation of church and state that has served this country well.

I do not know whether Morris Dees is "anti-Christian," as the Backtalk reader charges. But anyone familiar with Mr. Dees’ background quickly understands that the gentleman had something of a conversion akin to that of the great Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road.

The story was told in The Crewe-Burkeville Journal story.

Mr. Dees was running a very lucrative direct mail company. He was on a trip to Cincinnati and was snowed-in at the airport. It proved to be a night, in his words, of "soulful searching."

He sold his business and took up the cause of the poor and oppressed in the Deep South. Mr. Dees has found their their interest case by case ever since.

My late mother told me not to judge people. But Mr. Dees' approach to life sounds very Christ-like to me. Christ sought to help those left behind by society. He sought to bring light into the dark corners of the world.

Morris Dees, like all of us, is a mortal man. But he has done some very Christ-like things, at least in my mind.

But if he were Hannibal Lecter or someone about that evil and received an invitation to speak at a great college or university such as Longwood, then he should be entitled to have that forum.

A university, if it is anything, is a forum for learning and hearing differing points of view.

I suspect that the Longwood administration will not bother to respond to our reader's letter of protest . I hope my little words help filled that void.