Greetings. There is a controversy now raging regarding XM's suspension of the raucous "Opie and Anthony" team for a month, over their admittedly vulgar remarks regarding some highly-placed female personages. Apparently the suspension has caused considerable outrage and blowback from many XM subscribers, who thought they were paying XM's non-trivial fees for uncensored programming free of the usual Nanny-FCC constraints.

I am not a fan of O&A's style of humor, nor of Howard Stern's for that matter, but Howard nicely crystallized the rapidly declining environment for freedom of speech when he reacted to this case by telling his Sirius audience, "If you want free speech, walk in a closet and talk to yourself."

There are two primary forces at work creating an increasingly suffocating situation. One is persons using religious, racial, and related concerns to try enforce a "we'll tell you what you can say" attitude, often with threats of new regulations and laws, which given Congress' willingness to pander is not an outcome to be easily dismissed as unlikely.

Related to this is the mess at the FCC, where the enormous amounts of money involved in broadcasting and telecommunications have caused distortions that can impact many facets of our lives in extremely negative ways.

In the O&A case, many observers feel -- including myself -- that XM's action is a thinly veiled attempt to garner favor at the FCC for the proposed XM/Sirius merger (to which I'm firmly opposed).

There's lots of speech that is crude, obnoxious, and just plain disgusting, even outside of government offices! But that's the price we pay to live in an ostensibly free society, and that freedom is ensconced right there at the top of the Bill of Rights.

Holier-than-thou demagogues are now engaged in a concerted campaign to restrict public and even private discourse -- on conventional airwaves, satellite and cable, the Internet, and even on the streets, to meet their small-minded mentalities and limitations. Preying on the fears of government officials and legislators is key to their modus operandi.

We may individually dislike -- even strongly hate -- much of what we see or hear when it comes to speech, but if we let these wannabe moral dictators have their way, we'd better start clearing out some room in our closets right now. As Stern suggested, those may soon be the only uncensored venues left.

--Lauren--