Playing nice

Bomboniera
October 19th, 2006

This piece from the Sacramento Bee showed up in our clips today, and it does a good job of fleshing what I was saying the other day about the Scalia/Strossen panel at our membership conference.

If you missed it, it will rerun this Saturday, the 21st, at 7:00pm ET on C-SPAN.

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The other panel I’d recommend is “Artists Speak Out on Civil Liberties,” with comics Greg Proops - from “Whose Line Is It, Anyway?” - and Maggie Cassella, poets Sekou (tha Misfit) and Steve Connell, and visual artist Daniel Heyman. I’m sure I enjoyed it as much as I did in part because I was freaking exhausted and they were funny and foul-mouthed. But hey.

Editorial: Political comity
No joke. It exists. See for yourself

Published 12:00 am PDT Wednesday, October 18, 2006

If you want to break from nasty election politics and see instead a civil debate on civil liberties, watch C-Span’s debate last Sunday between U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and American Civil Liberties Union President Nadine Strossen (”ACLU State of Civil Liberties” at www.c-span.org ).

The two clearly disagree on some issues and agree on others, and they have very different approaches to the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Yet they have mutual respect for each other and a sense of humor about their differences. Instead of politics as warfare, theirs is politics as civil discourse. It would be nice to see a little more of this in our increasingly polarized style of politics.

Scalia can be acerbic and Strossen can be overly dramatic (once holding up thong underwear to make a point about privacy), but here both were substantive and funny.

Scalia began with cases where he and the ACLU are in agreement.

When the administration picked up Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen, in Afghanistan and detained him for almost three years without any charges or trial at Guantánamo and then in South Carolina, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration attempts to hold him indefinitely without trial. Scalia said Hamdi is entitled to be tried as is any American citizen.

In another case, when police suspected Danny Kyllo was growing marijuana in his home, they scanned his home with a thermal imager without a search warrant. Scalia said the Fourth Amendment protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures” becomes a farce if police can do warrantless home invasions with high-tech surveillance devices.

For her part, Strossen challenged Scalia on his refusal to protect rights for consenting adults to read materials or have sexual intimacies in the privacy of their own homes. She sees such rights as squarely within the tradition of the First and Fourth Amendments. Scalia shrugged and said, that may be so, but insisted that democracy means that on controversial issues, we debate, persuade each other and vote on it — not hand the issue over to nine unelected lawyers on the Supreme Court.

It was all very cordial and substantive, leaving people to pick their sides without seeing the other side as “evil” or “enemies” to be snuffed out. How refreshing.