Court's hate ruling is a crime

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

The language is weighty and obtuse. It bewilders. It intimidates.

The whole process intimidates. Nine Supreme Court justices, theoretically the smartest people in the country, unanimously decide that a cross burned on the lawn of one of the first black families to move into a Minnesota neighborhood is merely an exercise of free speech, a right of all Americans. And we, ordinary citizens who don't wear robes, who don't sit on the highest court of the land, are made uncomfortable by the decision but feel that within the body of ponderous words, there must be some truth, some noble justification that we simply don't understand.

"The majority holds that the First Amendment protects those narrow categories of expression long held to be undeserving of First Amendment protection, at least to the extent that lawmakers may not regulate some fighting words more strictly than others because of their content," Justice Byron White wrote for the majority opinion.

So, although an act may be horrible and despicable, such an act is an expression which has to be allowed because acts are freedoms and freedom can't be forbidden, because what would happen to this country? What shackled, shuffling refuse we would become, what automatons of the state, if we couldn't express our rage and our hate by intimidating and threatening and burning crosses on people's lawns and spraying swastikas on their doors.

This is the history alleged by Minnesota authorities: Early in the morning of June 21, 1990, Robert A. Viktora, a 17-year-old white high school dropout and several of his buddies were drinking at the home of 18-year-old Arthur Miller 3rd, who lived across the street from Russ and Laura Jones and their five children, who are black. The young men were talking about "burning" some blacks when they allegedly taped two pieces of a broken chair together and made a cross. They wrapped a cloth around the cross, ran across to the Jones' yard, stuck it there, saturated it with paint thinner, set it on fire, and like the cowards that most haters are, ran off to hide.

In St. Paul, where this constitutional demonstration of free speech occurred, cross-burning was then illegal. But when Viktora was arrested, he (read: his clever attorneys) challenged the constitutionality of the law and on Monday the highest court in the land decided that the law, indeed, was unconstitutional.

What the Supreme Court ruled is that the First Amendment prohibits the government from "silencing speech on the basis of its content."

Now that's pretty interesting, considering that just last year this same court ruled the federal government had the right to suppress speech about abortion at family planning clinics, if these clinics accepted federal funds.

What's the reasoning here? Am I missing something, a course, perhaps in confusion and obfuscation? If there is to be no "silencing speech on the basis of its content," then why is the federal government silencing speech? How can it be a crime to mention the word abortion to a woman in a health clinic, but not be a crime, beyond trespassing or vandalism, to burn a cross on a person's lawn?

Something is wrong here.

The Supreme Court picks and chooses what freedoms to defend. The judges said that legislatures cannot single out racial, religious or sexual insults as threats for prosecution under "hate speech" or "bias crimes." And yet they singled out one word out of millions and banned the mention of it themselves.

Interesting. The message I walk away with is this: In America today the words nigger, kike, wop, spik, chink, fag, dyke are all protected by the Constitution. You can shout them anywhere. In some places, not in Massachusetts, you can spray them on private homes and public buildings and only be charged with vandalism because the words aren't the offense, the paint is.

But the word abortion. Now that's a problem. So big a problem that the House of Representatives, the President of the United States and the Justice Department have all stepped into the fray. Should a person who works in a federally funded health care facility be jailed, if he mentions the word, if he even whispers it? Should the clinic be shut down?

Stay tuned for the answers. For these are the ponderous issues that worry America's best minds - not hate, not race, not vile, malicious, unprovoked acts of meanness.

This is America, 1992: On its way to nowhere, a nation with its head in the sand.