In Reasononline, Tim Cavanaugh covers the controversy over http://www.campus-watch.org/. My favorite line is "Like most debates, this one demonstrates the healthy futility of debate." He's right. I think Free Speech is way overrated when it only means continuous haranguing with the same thing everybody has already heard you say ad nauseum.


This is what annoys me the most about the current controversy in Salt Lake City over the status of a former section of Main Street which the city sold to the LDS church. Previously the street was hardly a major artery, it ran between Temple Square and a block of church offices and other church-owned buildings. The church has built a new Conference Center on the area just north of this street and wanted to use the space for an expansion of its underground parking garage. It paid $8 million for the property and spent millions more to transform it from asphalt to a plaza with benches and flower beds and a fountain. But when the church insisted that those using the plaza could not smoke, panhandle, demonstrate or harangue passersby, the ACLU decided it was too much.


The ACLU really opposed the sale from the outset, but it had no legal grounds to roll it back, so it settled for suing to strike the church's rules on the grounds that, having given the city a public easement across the plaza, it could not put conditions on the public's use of the space which would violate the right to Freedom of Speech. Their suit was dismissed by the U.S. District Court, but that was overturned by the 10th Circuit. The generally anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune champions the preservation of our precious right of free speech, allowing the religious kooks who now harangue people on the other three sides of Temple Square to do so on this side as well. (I think it is the fact that the Mormon church doesn't have a paid ministry that is so threatening to the ministers of other churchs, along with the fact that it claims to be a restoration of, and so clearly resembles, the church established by Jesus and his apostles after his death & resurrection.) The church's position is that it wants the plaza to be a pleasant place to walk and rest, and that smoking and harrassing people would conflict with that goal.



The whole thing is silly. To think that one block will destroy the Constitution is Gulliverian, as is the suggestion that because a space is open to the public, you can't put any restrictions on its use. But people who resent Mormonism's majority in Utah are always happy for an excuse to complain that the church wants to control everybody's lives. They can't understand why we have liquor laws that make it difficult to get a cocktail, or why Utah is so conservative (Duh!), and it drives them nuts that the law just doesn't ban Mormonism, like it did in the good old days back in Missouri. In the 1830s Missouri's governor issued an extermination order against all Mormons, which wasn't formally withdrawn until 1976.