Residents of the Vineyard have a well-timed opportunity to defend dissent next Thursday (July 29) when notable residents will gather at the Chilmark Community Center at 7 p.m. to read the works of famous authors, poets, scholars and journalists who have been excluded from the United States because of their political views.

Titled An Evening Without, the public reading comes at a critical moment for Hollman Morris, a Colombian journalist who last week became the latest victim of the U.S. State Department’s practice of so-called ideological exclusion — keeping controversial figures out of our country based on their political speech and peaceful associations.

Mr. Morris was denied a visa to come to Massachusetts to begin a prestigious Nieman Foundation journalism fellowship at Harvard this fall. He apparently upset Colombian government officials and their friends in the U.S. State Department with his award-winning reports on the long and complex civil war in Colombia.

Mr. Morris reportedly was told by local consular officials that he was being denied a visa under the “terrorist activities” section of the Patriot Act.

Free speech groups, including the ACLU, American Association of University Professors, PEN American Center, the Committee to Protect Journalists and others have sent letters to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging her to grant a visa to Mr. Morris. Nieman Foundation curator Robert Giles has warned that the exclusion of Mr. Morris represents “a major recasting of press freedom doctrine if journalists, by establishing contacts with so-called terrorist organizations in the process of gathering news, open themselves to accusations of terrorist activities and the possibility of being barred from travel to the United States.”

But there is another victim of the State Department’s practice of ideological exclusion: the American people.

We — as Americans — have a first amendment right to hear what Morris and other notable thinkers from around the world have to say and to engage with them in face-to-face dialogues. When our government excludes journalists, scholars, authors, activists and poets from our country, our first amendment rights are violated.

Sadly, ideological exclusion has been used by virtually every administration in recent U.S. history. The list of people who have been excluded from the United States based on their ideology is a veritable who’s who of famous literary figures, journalists and dissidents.

Ideological exclusion was codified in modern times during the Red Scare. In 1952, Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act, permitting the government to use vague accusations of communism to exclude such notables as Canadian prime minister-to-be Pierre Trudeau, British writer Graham Greene and British silent screen comedian Charlie Chaplin.

In subsequent years, famous novelists Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Doris Lessing were excluded, as was environmentalist and humor writer Farley Mowat of Canada. Poets, playwrights and Nobel Laureates also have been among the excluded, notably Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Italian playwright Dario Fo.

In the 1990s, terrorism replaced communism as the primary basis for ideological exclusion. It was on this basis, for example, that Nelson Mandela was excluded from the United States.

Soon thereafter, Congress resurrected the practice of excluding people on the basis of their ideas and associations as part of the USA Patriot Act. Although nominally directed at terrorism — just as the Cold War laws had been directed at communism — provisions of the Patriot Act effectively permit our government to use immigration laws and ever-expanding terrorism watch lists as instruments of censorship.

One of the more amusing responses to ideological exclusion came when the government denied award-winning British novelist Ian McEwan entry into the country in 2004. Mr. McEwan thanked the Department of Homeland Security “for protecting the American public from British novelists.”

Increasingly, our government has targeted academics for exclusion. In June 2005, the government excluded Dora Maria Tellez — a Nicaraguan historian and former leader of the Sandanista Revolution — who had been appointed as the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard.

The Bush administration also denied visas to South African sociology professor Adam Habib and Swiss scholar Tariq Ramadan, both of whom were turned away by the State Department after publishing remarks critical of U.S. foreign policy.

Fortunately, legal challenges by the ACLU on behalf of both Professor Habib and Professor Ramadan led to the issuance of a waiver by the State Department earlier this year, thus permitting them to enter and engage in academic exchanges here in the U.S.

Professor Habib recently spoke at Harvard Law School, saying, “I’ve always been opposed to terrorism, even when I was an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa . . . We have to recognize that criticism is the lifeblood of a democracy. When the United States as a great power undermines academic freedom, civil liberties, and its own Constitution, it has ripple effects across the globe.”

The State Department should move quickly to issue a visa waiver for Hollman Morris so that he can begin his Nieman fellowship in August. And then the Obama administration and Congress should end the anti-democratic practice of ideological exclusion, permanently.

Carol Rose is executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts.