Tina, don't take this as being skeptical, but, knowing that such hate speech often gets the result that it overtly asks for (eg.-the killing of an African student a few years ago after a speech by a KKK leader visiting a town in the northwest in which he told the skinhead crowd to "go out and kill some niggers"), would you defend their rights if the song was, instead of CopKiller, maybe CatholicKiller or HomosexualKiller or NiggerKiller? I will defend true first amendment rights to the last drop myself, but the responsibility for hate speech and its results has to belong to the speaker, and people of good will do not have to defend it as if it really were political or cultural speech. Of course it's legal, but morally it is indefensible, and we don't have to pretend that it's not. One thing that saddens me is that in the US the only people who are usually willing to use words like morality in public or private speech are the right wing nuts like Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, etc, so that the only discussion most people get to hear about morality is through these distorted mouthpieces. In other countries, such as my wife's native Czech Republic, President Vaclav Havel often uses the M-word in speeches. He is a great inspiration, if only to the choir, but hopefully it goes farther than that.

Chet W.