If there's someone out there who has the words of this sontg and wants to share them, they can post them here. Nobody can stop them. Nothings going to happen to them. Hell, if they are paranoid that someone onthe Mudcat is going to hate them because they've posted the words, they can dump their cooklie. Th question of censorship doesn't come into it, and I can't see why the word keeps on cropping up. Censorship is when someone uses their power to stop something being sprinted or said or whatever. That hasn't happened here. It can't happen here. It's not a public gathering where it is possible to shout someone down, anymore tha yoe can heckle a radio programme. It's not in the nature of the baste.

As with most disagreements there are a couple of intertwined issues here.

One is to do with censorship in general - "you've got a right to say what you want to and I'll defend it even if I disagree" versus "you may have a right to say what you want to, but in some cases you might have to do it over my dead body". Maybe the US constitution holds the former view, but that doesn't end the argument. The US constitution has been known to get things wrong.

And there are the disagreements over the song itself - and here it breaks down into one disagreement about whether this is a song that propagates disparaging stereotypes Gypsies, and a separate disagreement about whether whether one propagating disparaging stereotypes of Gypsies is something that matters or not. And there's another one about whether it'd be a good idea for someone to post the words of the bloody song.

The bottom line for me is that it is important to recognise that the treatment given to Gypsies and other travelling people, has been (and often continues to be)terrible and shameful. This should never be trivialised, any more than the treatmetn given historically to Jews or black people or native people. And however we disagree about the other issues, I hope we all agree about that.