Sigh

Ann Althouse recounts how the first day of "common cause" is going. I don't know how it's ever going to heal when half the country insists that if you don't approve of gay marriage you must be a hateful bigot. That's a recipe for permanent division, not healing. These are educated, nuanced people, yet they recite this line like an article of faith, dehumanizing the majority who don't much care what gays do in private, but don't want to live in the Castro district either. We seem to have thrown out the social contract and replaced it with an admonition that people can behave however they like in public and you'll keep your mouth shut about it if you don't want to be hauled into court.

What are the limits of democracy and the right of the majority to decide the natura of society should be? For a number of years, recently, some Baptist preachers decided that they should have the right to verbally assault the crowds of LDS members going to their semiannual general conferences in Salt Lake City, with bullhorns. When the church purchased a section of a street from the city and turned it into a public plaza with benches and fountains and flowers, but reserved the right to insist that no panhandling, vagrancy, street preaching and skimpy clothing were allowed, the ALCU and a local Unitarian congregation took the city and the LDS Church to court to protect these activities as protected freedoms. The plaza in question had become part of Temple Square and opened up an area around the Salt Lake Temple. Many wedding parties celebrated in the plaza taking photos with from the East with the front of the temple in the background. A few lay preachers took it upon themselves to interrupt these private events by intruding on the photos, haranguing the wedding parties with amplified warnings that they were going to hell, and other obnoxious behavior. The city's population is no longer majority LDS and they have elected a former ACLU attorney as mayor, so he basically sided with those who wanted to verbally abuse Mormons wherever and whenever possible in as loud and hostile a fashion as possible.

It occurred to me that this kind of stuff would normally be considered a public nuisance, but because of court decisions elevating Freedom of Speech above such presumed rights as the right to go through a public areas without being insulted and harangued, the kind of civility that used to be expected is no longer allowed to be guaranteed by the law. Even a wedding party on a public right of way was no longer protected from being spoiled by hostile disturbance from zealots of a rival relition. So much for public peace and quiet. No ordinance against disturbing the peace could stand up to the First Amendment. Even the right to assemble peacefully was subject to interference by jerks with bullhorns. That did not apply during the Winter Olympics, however, only to LDS General Conference.

This is what has caused me to reconsider my previous libertarian assumptions, when I realized that the Bill of Rights was trumping basic nuisance and public order laws.

I think that something similar is at least part of what those Right-way/Wrong-way poll results were about. And if you aren't allowed to have a say about what kind of behavior is acceptable in public and to a certain extent in your own neighborhood, what's the point of living in society? It's particularly troublesome when the courts allow themselves to be used by proponents of social change to impose it regardless of democratically-arrived-at laws. I think that a lot of religious conservatives already feel that their right to have a say in what is allowed in public life has been given short schrift. Maybe that's why the turnout for Bush was so great in the face of the turnout efforts of the Democrats, and why his support among blacks almost doubled. This year gay marriage was on the ballot in 11 states.

I believe that there must be a balance between public order, public safety, much of which are matters of perception, and the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, which were intended to protect dissent and speechifying, but not harrassment and activities that put others in fear, such as the Nazis marching in Skokie Illinois. I think that courts should be capable of distinguishing the two, but they seem to think they are hamstrung by the preeminence of the First Amendment over the right to feel secure in one's home or even on the street.

Downtown Main Street in Salt Lake City is dying commercially today because the "walkability" of it has been ruined by vagrants and panhandlers. Businesses have closed and the city fathers are feeling the loss of sales taxes to suburban malls. The mayor thinks the answer is a more vibrant nightlife, which he thinks will result from more bars and nightclubs, but I doubt that this will make up for the daytime trade which has been lost because people no longer feel safe to just walk along main street and window shop without being accosted by panhandlers and mentally ill homeless people.

I generally believe that public life should be bland enough to be as inoffensive to as many people as possible, consistent with requirements of peace, order and safety, and that people should be tolerant and accepting of others' religions, race, cultural backgrounds and basic freedoms guaranteed by the constitution. That's why it doesn't bother me if the majority of those attending a football game want a prayer to open the fesitivities. That's why it's ok to drink alcohol, but not to drink and drive or be falling down drunk in public, for example. It's ok to be a nudist at home, but not in the shopping mall. And so forth.

I think that we no longer seem concerned by "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." It's all about everybody being free to do his own thing, and that worries me.