Herban Sprawl

Ya gotta love BGF. He took a snippet from my news round-up of the other day regarding my disdain for the Democrats running for city council and decided I needed a lesson in the constitution. He raised the specter of St. Atticus Finch in reminding me that his friend, who I criticized for defending the white supremacist, did the right thing by providing a capable defense for an accused person.

I mulled this for all of three seconds before shaking my head. (He warned me he was going to blog about it, so I’ve had time to consider the issue. See Rossiferous.blogspot.com.) With all due respect to my learned friend, I’m going to butt heads with him. Won’t be the first time and I certainly hope it won’t be the last because he is too much fun to spar with!

Atticus Finch defended a man who was about to be shanghaied in what amounted to a kangaroo court. He was defending him in view of a future that he fervently hoped would not include the racism that the poor man was experiencing. The man was accused of doing something he had not done. I believe that Atticus took the moral high ground in agreeing to represent the man.

Now the question for me, as a voter in the Star City, boils down to whether the candidate took the moral high ground in defending a white supremacist who had plastered his website with the personal information of a number of people he’d targeted, among whom was the columnist Leonard Pitts.

The witnesses in the case, all of whom had been made to feel unsafe and anxious due to the man’s online diatribes, have a right to privacy. One could argue he only posted information that others could have found, as well, but that certainly wouldn’t make me feel any better if he had targeted me. Besides, he phoned these people at home, which was probably pretty darn frightening. I’m sure he felt mighty powerful that he had that kind of effect on their lives.

We do have the right to free speech, but normally we self-edit in the name of decency and respect for the rights of others. We know we can get into trouble for shouting, “Fire!” in a crowded theater. But what happens when someone crosses that line and harm comes to the target? Does this man bear responsibility?

I say he does for the same reason Hitler bore responsibility for giving anti-Semites permission and the means to murder millions of Jews. It’s a matter of acknowledging the fact that mob bosses don’t generally get their own hands dirty, but they bear responsibility for instigating harm to others. After someone else has done the deed, our supremacist can sit back and say, “But I didn’t do anything. I only exercised my right to free speech.”

What we’re painfully aware of is that this kind of pretend innocence on the part of someone who seems to have an excess of narcissism has the potential to invite harm to any citizen he deems worthy of his attention. Proving intentional malice is difficult, but then again it comes down to a matter of what we, as the body politic, are willing to accept as protected by the law. Americans have the right to sue for defamation of character, but what suits can people like Leonard Pitts lodge for the violation of their sense of safety?

The first amendment protects me as I write this, but it is my own moral compass that serves as a check on what I write. The delete button works wonders after one has vented.

The point is: we have a right to free speech according to the U.S. Constitution. We don’t have the right to inflict harm on others. The drunk driver didn’t intend to hit and kill anyone else, but we willingly jail drunk drivers for that crime. Seems to me a neo-Nazi could be charged as an accessory in the event some nut case decides to make him happy by killing one of his targets. Maybe if he knows there would be consequences, he’d realize this is attention he doesn’t need.

Regardless, this was not a matter of being a court appointed attorney. The city council hopeful was paid to defend this man. He had a choice. He didn’t have to take the case. I’m not buying the fact that he believed so fervently in the man’s right to a fair trial. His war chest for this council election is enormous. He has a wife, two daughters and a brand new McMansion. I believe he did it for the money.

I am not saying the candidate is a bad person, but I do have a lot of reasonable doubt as to the man’s true reasons for taking that case. BGF says the guy is well-intentioned and he may well be, but I grew up reading the Chicago Tribune and I own a healthy amount of Tuscan cynicism when it comes to people who want to be on any city council. That big fat war chest for a stupid city council election unnerves me. Agreeing to defend a sleezeball and then turning up as a city council candidate has me scratching my head. Something is fishy here…

Like I said. Atticus Finch was taking the high ground and trying to right a moral wrong. There was no moral high ground in defending a guy who intentionally was guilty of playing Hitler games, and who paid for the services. I just cannot bring myself to vote for this candidate. He may well be a nice guy. I will never doubt BFG on that score, but the Ick Factor just will not let me support his candidacy. It would be so easy to blow it off by saying that I won’t vote for a lawyer for city council, but I’ve always voted for our current mayor, so I’d be called out on that one. No, I have to pass on this one so I can still look at myself in the mirror in the morning, and into the faces of my African American friends.

And finally, I did NOT grow up near Chicago. You’d think that after 40 years BFG’d get that straight! Chicago was a long way off from the cornfields of north central Illinois!