I think that's the first time I have been called a liberal pinhead in the past 20 years.
It was disgusting, it was deplorable, it was intentionally provocative. But it was also necessary for the government not to be allowed to say "because this venue you have chosen will offend people, you may not excercise your rights of assembly and freedom of speech in this public arena."
Let me ask you to think about this.
Putting aside, and I mean this quite seriously, any feeling for whether you approve or disapprove of the relative messages given, and looking solely at the rights of citizens to peaceably assemble and exercise their free speech rights without any regard for the content of the message, was the decision of the Nazis to march in Skokie any more provocative, and did it have any more potential for disruption, than the decision of King to march in Selma?
Did the Nazis represent as much of a legitimate danger to the established way of life in Skokie as the civil rights marches represented a legitimate danger to the established way of life in the South? Did the Jews of Skokie feel the need to murder Nazi marchers and bury their bodies in dams, to firebomb their meeting places? Did the police of Skokie feel so threatened that they needed to turn police dogs on the marchers?
I am proud to have been a small part of the civil rights movement, to have marched in the marches, to have sat in the segregated restaurants, to have sat in in front of segregated theaters, to have been arrested and thrown in jail, yes, even to have my very own FBI file that linked me with what J. Edgar was wont to call the communist menace of integration.
If the potential for disruption, the need to maintain public order, had been allowed as reasons to prohibit marches, there would not have been a single march anywhere south of the Mason Dixon line. They would have made the marchers go march where they would not be provocative, on Boston, or New York, or even San Francisco. But not in Selma, or Birmingham, or even, yes, Annapolis, which not long before you got there was as segregated as any other city in the south.
That is the awful and awsome thing about the first amemendment. It must -- MUST -- protect the rights of Martin Luther King and David Duke to precisely the same degree. It must not -- MUST NOT -- be allowed to say "we the government like message A, so its proponents get to march where they want to, but we the government abhor message B, so its proponents must only march where we want to let them."
The rights of King and Duke are inextricably intertwined, and one cannot deny one without denying the other. |
