Of course ABC and its parent company Disney were right to cancel the sitcom “Roseanne” after its eponymous star, Roseanne Barr, wrote a racist tweet. There are necessary taboos and essential decencies in every morally healthy society. Writing that Obama administration aide Valerie Jarrett was the baby of “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes” violates these in the foulest of ways.
This is not a First Amendment issue. Constitutional rights are what you’re entitled to in the public sphere, not as an employee of a private corporation. Barr’s speech has not been curtailed; she remains free to opine to her heart’s content. She’s just not free to do so while getting $250,000 a show from an employer whose reputation she stained and whose values she traduced.
This is not a “free speech” issue – using “free speech” in the broader, less legalistic sense of the term. The University of Chicago president, Robert Zimmer, has made the case that institutions like his, though not strictly subject to the First Amendment, should nonetheless encourage the free and vigorous exchange of ideas for the sake of fostering intellectual excellence. That’s right. But what Barr tweeted wasn’t an idea. It was a slur.
This is not a “double standards” issue. Donald Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday to denounce Disney’s chairman, Robert Iger, for not apologizing to him for the “HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC.” But he’s the ultimate public figure, whereas Jarrett is a private citizen subjected to unprovoked racial attack by an ABC employee.
This is not a “one bad tweet” issue. The relevant question here is: What’s the “totality” of Barr’s work, at least when it comes to political and racial questions? John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, summed it up perfectly when he described Barr as “a boor,” a “notorious believer and propagator of conspiracy theories related to 9/11.”