The Heckler veto is the action by which someone, whether an actual or simply a possible someone, who disagrees with a speaker’s message is able to unilaterally get a speaker silenced or prevent important information getting to those who need it because that someone, or possible someone, objects, or might possibly object, to information even if it has no relevance to them and even if that person, or possible person, has no real knowledge of what the information actually is.

They might object merely to the idea, but not the substance of the information.

There also does not have to be an actual objection, merely the possibility that “someone” at some time might take offense with no specific time or actual objection required.

The possible controls the actual. A minority of one, or a possible one, if the heckler veto is allowed, can control the information important to the many.

Once in Oklahoma City, during Gay History Month, as it was once called, when I posted a list of GLBT people who had made great contributions to society in areas such as music, art, science, politics, and pop-culture, I was directed to remove it because someone at some point might object to it. A potential and at the time fictitious imaginary person was being given control over positive information that was important to Gay students who actually existed in real time.

And even if one person, or a group had any objection, that objection should have been weighed against need.

In legal cases dealing with the Heckler Veto, it has been decided in most cases that a party’s actions cannot be preemptively stopped due to fear of heckling by a reacting party. In the other cases, the heckler veto was supported only if there was the obvious chance for violence.

It was not the censoring of content that allowed the action, but the threat of violence, and unlike the preemptive censorship in the other cases, in these cases there was a target for action based on issuing the threat.

In the 80s, when I was teaching in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the AIDS epidemic was in its cruel infancy with little being done at the governmental level, to address It, and any treatment, support system, or prevention had to be organized by individuals and groups.

Not being naive to the reality that many high school students were sexually active, and knowing that because religious leaders and politicians were promoting the idea that this was God’s punishment upon “The Gays” people who were not Gay assumed they were safe, a belief school district leaders found to be potentially harmful especially as few facts were known at the time, the leaders of the district proposed making what information there was available at the high schools subject to modification as needed.

The district also proposed making condoms available and under the control of school nurses, as opposed sitting in bowls available to any student who might pass by one, and thereby removing the reluctance to use them that the shame of buying or stealing them might cause.

Acknowledging that there would be some objections, the school board held community meetings in various areas of the district to explain the proposal and hear people’s suggestions and concerns.

As the building representative at my school and being one of the union’s area representatives, I attended the meeting in my school’s area.

While few parents attended the meeting, there were a number of local clergy who voiced their religious objections to this proposed prevention program with many cautioning against interfering with God’s assumed plan to wipe out immorality through a mass killing..

When it was my turn to speak, I thanked the clergy for their input, but pointed out that their objections were based on the tenets of their particular denominations, and that these were not universally applicable to the general population many of whom belonged to other denominations with other beliefs under the umbrella of Christianity, or prescribed to no religion at all.

As far as high school kids, those who belonged to their denominations should be instructed in their tenets on sexuality and sex outside of marriage, and parents should effectively pass on their values on the same topic, and done effectively, information on AIDS and available condoms would be of no interest to them. If, however the church and parents fell short in the effectiveness of their teachings, the possibility of that should not dictate how others could deal with an ever increasing crises.

I asked how effective and attractive their teaching and values could possibly be if just the availability of information and the controlled access to condoms were strong enough to negate them.
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They were attempting to apply the heckler veto to promote their own beliefs and override those of the majority.

As there was no imminent impending harm, and as violence was not threatened as a way to curtail information or the controlled availability of condoms, the district went ahead with its program acknowledging that there had been some objections.

As is the case of anti-vaxers who now find their children suffering from preventable illnesses, some of which have resulted in death, I have remained curious how many of those who objected to the district’s program eventually found their children, or even themselves, dealing with a virus whose contracting they could have prevented.

As sad as that might be, the upside is that they ultimately had no control over the fate of other people’s children.

A more subtle form of the heckler veto is the requirement to make sure things are “family friendly”.

In my experience this has meant that information that might be of general interest, especially to adolescents and adults, must not be offensive or confusing to children who might not understand it, the offense and confusion of it being evaluated by the parents of the child with no input from the child.

In this case the pseudo-desire to protect the child from harm is actually the parent promoting his or her own beliefs regardless of those of others.

Years after the Los Angeles Unified Schools experience I experienced an attempt at library censorship when people from one particular Christian denominations wanted books that presented anything positive about GLBT people banned from the young reader section of the Oklahoma County library system.

Their rationale was that as their children might accidentally come upon it and sign the book out, this would be exposing them to information that was both objectionable to their parents and confusing for the children. As they found it against their taste and beliefs, they wanted to deny the books to children of other parents who shared neither.

They were using their children as tools of censorship.

Although these books were eventually placed on shelving that would keep them out of the reach of smaller children, these parents were advised that if they feared what books the children may take out of the library, best practice would be for them to be in the library with their children as opposed to dropping them off without parental supervision and picking them after they chose which books they had signed out to take home.

A very recent example of the attempted use of this form of veto was when, after a lecture on gender and the Whaling industry, out of all the positive evaluations, one complaint was lodged that the lecture should have been more family friendly by omitting the reference to spermaceti, the oil in the heads of some whales, being named by whalers after human sperm that it resembled and which they thought it was, and to the possible existence of homosexual activity, as little as there was that was recorded on whale ships on overly long voyages.

The absurdity of this complaint was clear from the lecture having been delivered at 8:00 p.m. to an audience of adults with no possibility of some child wandering on off the street and into the lecture hall on the third floor of a building that required two elevators to reach, and getting scandalized. As the lecture followed a rather expensive dinner, the accidental, or even purposeful, attendance of a child was ruled out.

But the complaint was given legitimacy by its having been discussed along with ways to prevent such discomfort at future lectures.

The simplest and more mature solution would be to advise that individual not to attend future lectures or at least supply a list of objectionable topics that he or she wishes not to be subjected to, so an appropriate caveat could be offered.

Be wary of the heckler veto.

Its purpose is not for the good, but the coercive.