Finding common ground requires serious listeners

A while back, I was a guest on a cable-news talk show, scheduled opposite someone who presumably held a view different from mine. As the show began, a director enthusiastically told me through my earpiece to jump in and object whenever I felt like it. Nothing brings in viewers quite like a good argument.

Unfortunately for the show, I ended up hearing a lot of common ground in what my "opponent" was saying. We not only didn't argue, we ended up carrying on a friendly e-mail dialogue the next day.

I thought about this the other day when a news story hit the wire about protesters confronting White House adviser Karl Rove after he had delivered a speech at American University. The group (an Associated Press story said there were more than a dozen people) surrounded his car and threw things at it. Eventually, campus police had to lift some of these folks out of the way so that Rove's car could leave.

Presumably, these people were upset at Rove's behind-the-scenes influence in the Bush White House. As a practical matter, however, they added nothing to the debate over anything. They committed a crime and were lucky not to be arrested.

But they were acting in a way that seems almost expected these days, as if the concept of free speech has morphed into a whirlwind of sound and fury, where the loudest person wins.

Brigham Young University has invited Vice President Dick Cheney to be its commencement speaker later this month. Some students and faculty, as if taking a cue from the rising wave of intolerance nationally, are urging the school to withdraw the invitation. Others have gone so far as to say Cheney's speech makes a charade of the official political neutrality of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some have said that getting the vice president to speak would be seen as a good thing at any other university, but not at BYU — something I've been struggling in vain to understand. Are we really to believe a Cheney speech almost anywhere would be devoid of protests?

These people insult the intelligence of university students who most assuredly know they are free to agree or disagree with the vice president but that it is important to listen to someone who, for good or ill, is an important character in early 21st century U.S. history.

And allowing such a speech is especially important at a university. Nationwide, these are becoming places where freedom of thought too often is brought under the heel of speech codes and political conformity.