The Dixie Chicks: American Heroes

This article is a response to Superdork's article, "Why The Dixie Chicks Got Exactly What They Deserved."

First of all, Superdork, you write well, but don't ever give the impression that the war the Dixie Chicks talked about is related to September 11th. Even Bush acknowledges that there's not a direct link between the people we're killing now and the people that killed us in 2001. It's insulting to the memory of said people to draw a connection for a political purpose.

Superdork asserts that the Dixie Chicks practiced their right to free speech, and the backlash against them is another product of that right. I've heard this sort of argument before, and it's missing something crucial; us Dixie Chick defenders aren't claiming some illegality has been visited upon the band. We all recognize that if someone doesn't want to buy a CD, they shouldn't have to. We feel that their music being banned from public airwaves is a form of silly, jingoistic censorship, and we're against that.

Of course, legally a radio station can pull a song off the airwaves. That doesn't mean they should. We're at a scary point in America if we fail to protest a radio station pushing their views on the rest of us. We're not talking about one or two ma-and-pa radio stations taking a song off a play list. This was the outright banning of Dixie Chicks music by major music conglomerates because they had a business interest in the war we're in and the candidates that support that war.

Even for the personally owned stations (which don't exist, but hypothetically), censorship isn't right. Say I own a rock radio station, and I'm a Christian (I don't, and I'm not). If I ban Muslim artists from my airwaves, that would be a jackass thing to do. If my station was successful, it would say something negative about the society we're living in. That is our point; our country is flawed if we have a society where songs are censored for their artists' viewpoints. It's legal, yeah; it's legal to join the Ku Klux Klan, too. You're still a jackass for doing it.