When Rhonda Mangus, the mother of a gay teenager who had been the target of bullying, heard 14-year-old Caiden Cowger blame President Obama for "making kids gay," she was angry enough to start a drive to get him yanked off Spreaker, the online radio service that hosted his radio show. I use the past tense because as of yesterday, Spreaker has shut Cowger's mic.
"We’re really sorry, but the show The Caiden Cowger Program is not available," a message says instead. "Spreaker has deleted this show due to offensive contents."
This follows after YouTube also appeared to remove the show from its site, although its resurfaced elsewhere on the site and opponents have started a red-flagging campaign.
“While we not only support free speech, we help it find its way to more people faster and easier with our service that is the audio equivalent of YouTube, but like them, we cannot and will not condone hate speech," said Spreaker CEO Francesco Baschieri in a statement. "Consequently, we have pulled down audio content from Caiden Cowgar, whose recent gay-bashing clearly crosses the line from free — to hate — speech.”
My initial reaction was that Spreaker had gone too far by yanking his show. After all, compared to what is usually heard from religious right talk show hosts, accusing Obama of making kids gay is pretty mild stuff. But after listening to
the rest of Master Caiden's rant, I heard at least two instances during that piece where he all but encouraged harassment of gays. Based on hearing those, I'm left to conclude that Spreaker made the right call.
About 38 seconds into the piece, Cowger claims that there are 30 kids in his county that are gay. I remember from my journalism school days that if you give enough information to identify a person, it's legally the same as giving out his or her name and address. Although Cowger says he's against bullying, by essentially "outing" those kids he was all but inviting them to be harassed.
Then at 2:20, Cowger says he has a big problem with "not being allowed to convert people to my religion." To my ears, Cowger has no problem with dogging people like a pesky mosquito about being saved, even if they don't want to listen to it. No doubt that most of his audience heard that dog whistle.
The closest parallel I can draw in this case is to Andrew Shirvell, the former Michigan assistant attorney general who made headlines two years ago for his blog attacking Chris Armstrong, the openly gay student body president at the University of Michigan. To glean information for this blog, however, he engaged in tactics that can only be described as stalkerish. Among other things, he went as far as to follow several of Armstrong's friends in hopes of confronting him, snapped pictures of guests at a late-night party Armstrong held at his house, and even somehow obtained screenshots of Armstrong's Facebook page even after Armstrong blocked him from it. For those reasons, Shirvell was deservedly fired in November 2010.
The same principle applies here, to my mind. Cowger has every right to express his views, no matter how retrograde they may be. He does not, however, have the right to encourage harassment. You mean to tell me that he didn't know what he was doing when he said there were 30 gay kids in his county? And you mean to tell me he didn't know what he was doing when he said he thought gays needed to be "converted"? If Cowger seriously thinks he can convince me of that, there's a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell him.