Ordinarily, Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan are not the first two people I’d be rushing to defend.

Coulter, a conservative political commentator and author (I’m applying the term loosely), has awed many with the sheer rashness of her claims, including trying to defend Joseph McCarthy as a “misunderstood American hero,” and her infamous proposed solution to terrorists – that America should “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

Not to be outdone, Buchanan, another conservative commentator, once referred to Adolf Hitler as “an individual of great courage” with “extraordinary gifts.” He’s also claimed that multiculturalism is “an across the board assault on our Anglo-American heritage,” and that the liberation of American women was not due to feminist “noisemakers,” but to things like “the shopping center, the dishwasher, [and the] washer-dryer.”

So why would I defend two beauties like Coulter and Buchanan? Because lately, they’ve been physically attacked for exercising free speech.

Last week, a protester doused Buchanan with salad dressing while he spoke at Western Michigan University. A few days earlier, another noted conservative, William Kristol, was hit with a pie while speaking at a college in Indiana. And last October, two protesters threw pies at Coulter while she spoke at the University of Arizona. This is a shameful trend.

Don’t get me wrong. Between the views of Coulter and Buchanan, you have a scary combination of arrogance, xenophobia, misogyny and bigotry. I disagree with virtually everything either of them writes. But in America, you have the right to be arrogant, xenophobic, misogynistic and bigoted without people throwing food at you.

Even though it’s impossible to condone the actions of the food throwers (unless you want to argue that Coulter could really stand to eat a hamburger), it’s not hard to understand their frustrations. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for ordinary citizens to express dissenting views. Some may feel, however wrongly, that they have little choice but to resort to throwing food.

Last month, for example, President Bush held one of his “town hall” meetings in Denver to “discuss” social security. Three people were ejected from that meeting not for throwing food, not for being disruptive, but because they had a “No more blood for oil” bumper sticker on their car. In Fargo, North Dakota, a blacklist was discovered of 42 citizens to be barred from another Bush speech.

Call me old fashioned, but I thought the point of a speech or town hall meeting was to convince people of the correctness of your position or policy, not to surround yourself with people who already agree. If Bush believes his position is correct, he should be eager to convince those who are uncertain or who disagree.

Whether it’s by banning citizens from an event funded by their own tax dollars, or by throwing food at conservative talking heads to silence them, free speech in our country should be threatened neither by partisan bureaucracy nor by physical violence. We – protesters and presidents alike – all need to work harder to encourage the free expression of ideas, even those with which we do not agree. After all, one of the principles that makes America great is our value for the open exchange of ideas … not pies.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.