Maybe speech isn't quite free anymore

George Orwell nailed it 61 years ago when he published "1984." Big Brother's Thought Police in his nightmarish Oceania are alive, well, and gaining power.

Incredibly, a Tinley Park woman, Valerie Kenny, is threatened by up to three years in prison and a $25,000 fine for what she thinks. She came to the attention of the Thought Police when she yanked on another woman's headscarf. But that isn't why she's facing ruin. Her big mistake was berating the woman for her Muslim beliefs. That made her action a hate crime. That she won't actually be so severely punished is irrelevant.

The mere fact that she is being charged is proof that the dictates of the Thought Police have been accepted as a normal, even desirable, facet of American life.

If this woman had yanked on the Muslim woman's scarf and said nothing, it would have been simple assault and she would be facing at most a scolding from a judge. Her real "crime" was in revealing thinking of which the Thought Police disapprove.

Our Founding Fathers never dreamed that we'd ever need a constitutional guarantee to think whatever we liked. They figured freedom of speech would suffice. So we allow the most loathsome thoughts and ideas to be openly expressed in speech and in print. (Think of neo-Nazis.) But with the advent of Hate Crimes, even that freedom is being eroded.

As of this moment the Thought Police require a physical act to accompany the disapproved thought for it to qualify as a hate crime worthy of "enhanced punishment."

We know freedom of thought is dead, so when a physical act is no longer required we'll know that freedom of speech is also dead.

Don Frost

Rolling Meadows