A few years ago, I spoke on the Mumia Abu-Jamal case at the University of Maryland. During my speech and the question and answer period that followed, a group of thugs disrupted the meeting with yelling and other interruptions. Among other things, I was accused of being an FBI agent.

As far as treatment from the campus Left is concerned, I've experienced a lot worse. The reason I bring it up is that the University of Maryland is currently doing something about anti-free speech activists. Three students at Maryland's flagship university face punishment for disrupting a speech by Lynne Cheney with heckling and vulgarity.

The American Civil Liberties Union is finally defending speech on campus. The twist is that the speech that it is defending is the "right" of hecklers to disrupt lectures. In the past six years, I've been barred from speaking at a couple of campuses, shouted down at numerous locales, witnessed my writings go up in smoke in a book burning, and threatened with arrest if I dared take the podium. In all this time, the ACLU has never spoken out against any of this. They do feel compelled to speak in defense of those who assail free speech.

"What the university officials [at Maryland] appear to have done appears not only to be in violation of their own speech code, but also of the First Amendment," claims Susan Goering, the executive director of the ACLU in Maryland.

Whose civil liberties, exactly, are the ACLU protecting in their defense of hecklers and would-be censors?