Monthly Archives: June 2011

The First Amendment Applies to Public Employees Too

Posted by on 2011-06-14 No comments

The Standard Times editorial this morning (“Public Employees, Private Freedoms”) is a long piece defending the dismissal of Bourne firefighter Richard Doherty for griping that he had to work on the Fourth of July. To me, Doherty’s firing seemed to be just vindictiveness on the part of the town. After a somewhat tedious case law review (so that we fully appreciated all the “nuance” involved), the op-ed took the town’s side, offering the weakest of arguments:

“As a newspaper, we aggressively defend First Amendment rights, but Doherty’s behavior undermined public confidence in the town’s ability to provide emergency services. Public servants have a right to express their opinion, but there is no right to a job funded at taxpayer expense for conduct that breaches the public trust.”

First, does any sane person truly believe that Doherty’s gripes “undermined public confidence?” If undermining public confidence in government infrastructure is such a horrific betrayal of the public, please, let’s dismiss every Republican who has ever disparaged “Big Government” or actually undermined its effectiveness by slashing necessary services. But going after a guy because he whined about working on a holiday? Give me a break. I could see firing Mr. Doherty if he had refused to show up for work instead of merely griping.

Second, it seems to me, for all the nuanced case law review, the Standard Times misses the point that Constitutional freedoms are not abrogated the moment a person becomes a public employee. The First Amendment does not have a clause exempting prickly firemen from its protections.

The Standard Times editorial asks the question, whether a gay person could confidently receive services from a firefighter who had gone on record making homophobic remarks. Valid point, but once again, let’s ask this question about half of the Republican Party, including five candidates who want to roll back gay rights. Would a gay person accept help from a homophobe? Sure, if their house were burning down or they were going into shock. Being civil to those whose opinions we despise or who despise us is all part of living a society. We don’t have to like everyone who serves us. But they have to do their job.

The foregoing arguments also apply to the recent case of Anthony Weiner, whose antics have brought disgrace on him and his family. New York voters will have a chance to weigh in on Mr. Weiner’s effectiveness in a 2012 election. At that time they can decide if his personal actions warrant revoking the public’s trust in him. Frankly, Weiner’s wronged wife is the one who should be firing him, not the public which merely has a prurient fascination with sex scandals.

Far worse betrayals of the public trust go unchallenged and unmentioned daily in your pages. The president’s recent violation of the War Power Act, the fact we are now ensnared in combat in five Middle Eastern countries, our shameful foreign policy, and recklessly giving half the TARP money to the nation’s richest people. These are the real betrayals of public trust! Consider for a moment how many years the Democrats in the House Ethics Committee avoided any serious investigation of Charles Rangel and you understand how betrayal of the public is not a serious issue, to Republicans or Democrats.

Which brings me to the Standard Times.

As long as the press has colorful sex scandals to report or whining firemen to vilify in the op-ed page, it can continue to half-heartedly fulfill its duty to expose the truth of larger, more important issues. We have plenty of wars, employment, infrastructure, and budget crises a properly informed public needs to know about. Of course, in the age of embedded journalism, this requires going head to head with government, not simply being an echo chamber for it.

When the editor writes, “As a newspaper we aggressively defend First Amendment rights,” I want to shout something unprintable here. The hell you are! Why not simply give the vindictive town bureaucrat who just didn’t like Mr. Doherty space to vent in your own column?

The editor seems to have no grasp of what, truly, betrayal of the public consists.

This was published in the Standard Times on June 24, 2011
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20110624/opinion/106240309

The Stasi Among Us

Posted by on 2011-06-13 No comments

What nation permits the secret police to spy on its regular citizens with little oversight, cultivates informants, infiltrates cultural and political organizations, and turns neighbor against neighbor?

If you immediately thought of East Germany and the Stasi — go to the back of the class! This is happening in your own country.

The New York Times reports today that the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide will be modified to make unconstitutional fishing expeditions easier for the FBI. The relaxed rules permit investigations:

  • without any evidence of wrongdoing or criminal activity
  • without recording their reasons for doing so
  • administering lie-detector tests more easily
  • permitting more aggressive dumpster-diving
  • relaxing use of repeated surveillance squads
  • making it easier to infiltrate activist organizations
  • reducing restrictions on use of informants
  • permitting informants to permit in religious services

Intolerance

Posted by on 2011-06-08 No comments

This week the Wiesenthal Center announced that it had purchased a letter written in 1919, the first statement by a young Adolf Hitler proposing the removal of Jews from Germany.

Flash forward almost one hundred years later, in much of the United States it is now open season on Muslims. The number of attacks on mosques, particularly in the South, is now in the hundreds. Besides Quran burnings and mosque arson, Muslims have been beaten, stabbed, and shot. Even Sikhs (who are not Muslim but who wear turbans) and other brown-skinned people have been attacked. Hate groups freely sponsor talks by bigots like Geerd Wilders, often at churches and synagogues. “Anti-shariah” laws have been sponsored in numerous states; the goal is to outlaw religious courts similar to Jewish battei din, which their ignorant sponsors claim is going to replace secular law (which they want to outlaw themselves by pushing a fundamentalist Christian agenda).

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports a huge resurgence in white militias and hate groups. The Washington Post reports that approximately one hundred cases of domestic, right-wing terrorism have  been weakly pursued, or not at all, since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Meanwhile, gays, lesbians, and transgendered people are still trying to get a modicum of justice. In the minds of the same bible-thumping, Quran-burning fundamentalists, permitting Bob and Jim to get married is going to somehow destroy their own marriages.

And it’s all so petty. This morning I read in these pages that permitting transgendered children to use school lavatories would cause the end of civilization as we know it. It probably never occurred to the writer, a former teacher, that the incredibly minuscule number of children who would supposedly throw schools into such chaos could probably simply use the faculty bathrooms.

But the shrill voices just never shut up. We constantly hear attacks on gays in the military, illegal aliens, unions, environmental regulations, helping our neighbors, paying our fair share of taxes, and any number of things of which Ayn Rand would not approve.

Sixteen states have copied Arizona’s anti-Latino bill, SB 1070. The goal? Removing evil “illegal” foreigners from our midst.

And now, this week in our own community, a Guatemalan man was stabbed in a hate crime, allegedly by a thirteen year-old. I don’t know what was worse – the crime itself or the age of the perpetrator.

The specter of Mr. Hitler usually invokes some Jungian archetype of the ultimate evil, unbounded hate that humans simply cannot comprehend, some abstract demonic impulse, something paranormal.

But Mr. Hitler was hardly a demon. He was, unfortunately, much like us. Exactly like us.

Today, if his name were not so widely known, Mr. Hitler’s ideas would be warmly praised by the religious right – as they were in fact for a time in the Thirties here in the U.S. Because what Hitler wanted was not really so different from what the American religious right wanted then and wants today – a “purified” Christianized culture, preferably overflowing with White Protestants.

It was a relatively short twenty years from Hitler’s letter to the Final Solution. People today cannot comprehend how Germany, a nation of rational people, the most advanced technologically at the time, could have permitted itself to slide into insanity so fast.

Do we have to wait another twenty years before we understand?