Recalculating: Steve Chapman on a New Century - Steve Chapman

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other couples, sometimes split up, and in that case, Heather may not be able to get child support. Or her second mom may not get visitation rights, depriving the child of contact with a loved parent. A lot of things can happen if second-parent adoptions are not allowed, and all of them are bad.

      The effect of such laws is to say that homosexual parents may not adopt the children they raise even if adoption would be the best thing for the children. Anti-gay conservatives say they want to protect kids. Their policies say something else.

       Sunday, February 24, 2002

      William Harvey has a publicist’s uncanny knack for knowing how and where to place a message to make sure it gets the maximum response from an interested audience. But Harvey is not a publicist. He’s an opinionated New Yorker whose talent for communication has earned him a criminal indictment.

      On Oct. 4, just a few weeks after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., he showed up in military fatigues on a corner not far from ground zero. He was carrying a sign with Osama bin Laden superimposed over the World Trade Center buildings and handing out leaflets setting forth his belief that “America is getting paid back for what it’s doing to Islamic countries.”

      A crowd quickly gathered on the sidewalk around him, and it didn’t consist of well-wishers. With memories of the collapsing towers still painfully vivid, passersby screamed obscenities, demanded that he be locked up, and even threatened to kill him. A police officer surveyed the scene and placed him under arrest.

      Harvey was charged with disorderly conduct. Why? Because in the view of the officer, he deliberately “obstructed vehicular and pedestrian traffic.” The Manhattan district attorney’s office decided to pursue the case, and earlier this month, a county judge rejected Harvey’s claim that he was fully within his constitutional rights. He’s scheduled to go on trial in April.

      The defendant says he is being punished merely for expressing unpopular views in a public place. The judge, however, insists that his views are not at issue. “It is the reaction which speech engenders, not the content of the speech, that is the heart of disorderly conduct,” he declared. It’s reasonable to assume, said the judge, that he knew he was going to create “public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm.” By his thinking, if someone becomes disorderly because he’s angry over what Harvey said, then Harvey rather than his listener is in violation of the law.

      But the 1st Amendment does not protect Harvey’s right to say only things that won’t upset anyone, or to say them only in places where no one will care enough to stop to listen. And it’s not needed to assure the freedom of Americans to call Osama bin Laden an evil terrorist whose actions cannot possibly be justified. People with that view (which includes me) don’t have to worry about police and prosecutors coming after them.

      No, the constitutional mandate was created specifically to safeguard opinions that most of us despise and many of us would like to silence. It was meant to uphold the minority’s right to speak, especially in the face of majority opposition — no matter how stupid the minority or how vehement the majority. Harvey’s indictment, however, is based on the assumption that listeners have a right not to hear anything that may throw them into a fury.

      If getting in the way of pedestrian traffic is a crime, of course, it’s not just Harvey but his disgruntled listeners who are guilty. But the police apparently didn’t arrest any of the others. And it’s impossible to believe that the cop would have arrested Harvey if he had drawn a crowd by denouncing bin Laden. “It’s a heckler’s veto,” says UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh. “Anytime I threaten a guy, he gets arrested and I don’t.”

      But the heckler’s veto has been rejected by the Supreme Court over and over, in cases where the threat to public order was far greater than it was this time. In a 1949 case, for example, a man was arrested for disorderly conduct after delivering a speech so inflammatory it produced disturbances in a crowd of some 1,000 people outside the Chicago auditorium where he was speaking. But the court threw out his conviction.

      “A function of free speech is to invite dispute,” wrote Justice William O. Douglas then. “That is why freedom of speech, though not absolute, is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance or unrest.” That opinion could have been written as a direct rebuke of Harvey’s prosecution.

      The fact that this incident took place in wartime doesn’t give the authorities any more power to silence dissent. Nothing Harvey did created the suggestion that he was bent on terrorism. All he was doing was challenging the wisdom of American policies. That’s the sort of message that is especially important to hear at a time when the public is so united in believing we’re in the right.

      If we really are in the right, we can certainly survive the criticisms of people like William Harvey. And someday, when we’re in the wrong, we may need someone like him to let us know.

       Sunday, March 3, 2002

      Conscientious journalists inevitably say they are shocked and saddened when they discover that a fellow practitioner of the writing trade has defrauded readers. Lately, there has been a veritable Tournament of Roses parade of writers who have confessed to making up stories or stealing words.

      Stephen Ambrose, who became prosperous chronicling the heroism of ordinary men in World War II, committed the unheroic act of plagiarizing from other accounts in several of his books. Doris Kearns Goodwin, a former Harvard professor, had to acknowledge — 15 years after the matter was brought to her attention — that she appropriated passages from multiple sources in her book “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.”

      But while we workaday scribblers regret to see such lapses mar our noble profession, a part of us is also delighted and grateful to these worthies for unintentionally raising the meager value of our work. Those of us who have never written critically acclaimed best-sellers can at least boast that the non-fiction material we have written, we actually wrote, and it’s really not fictional.

      Once upon a time, that seemed only obvious. But it’s a claim that a dwindling number of writers can make. We few, we happy few. . . (Whoops! It was some guy named Shakespeare who wrote that, not me.)

      Every time you think the cascade of bamboozlement is over, it starts up again. Last week, The New York Times ran one of the most entertaining editors’ notes ever written, regretfully informing readers that an article published in its Sunday magazine was a king-sized whopper.

      In the piece, about the indentured servitude of an African boy in Ivory Coast, veteran freelance writer Michael Finkel employed a variety of what you might call unapproved techniques. He created a composite main character, attributed experiences to the character that “did not apply specifically to any single individual,” invented scenes, and composed the entire 6,000-word article “without consulting his notes” — notes that, upon inspection, turned out to contradict much of what he reported. The editors’ note could have just said, “Remember that article? Forget everything you read.”

      I would like to say I was shocked and saddened by Finkel’s misconduct. But I was too busy rolling on the floor laughing at his explanations to feel the faintest pang of woe. “I slipped,” he confessed manfully. “It deserved a correction. But there is a great deal of accuracy. Not once has the prose been called into question.”

      Well, he’s right. The prose was just fine. The only problem with the article was that it made “Lord of the Rings” look like a PBS documentary.

      But you will be relieved to know that Finkel’s bald-faced lies had a noble motive. Said he: “I hope readers know that this was an attempt to reach higher — to make something beautiful, frankly.” What’s the matter, reader — you against beauty?

      Ambrose and Goodwin were only slightly less brazen. Ambrose acted

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