Joe Bob's America: Silencing Osama lovers

NEW YORK, March 18 (UPI) -- Did you hear the story about the 54-year-old Osama-bin-Laden-lover at Ground Zero?

He survived. Really. William Harvey of Long Island City, New York, showed up two blocks from Ground Zero on Oct. 4, dressed in combat fatigues and carrying a sign that had a picture of Osama bin Laden superimposed over the Twin Towers. He was passing out leaflets and telling anybody who would listen that America deserved the terrorist attacks because of our policies toward Arab countries over the years.

A crowd formed at the corner of Maiden Lane and Nassau Street, with several people screaming at Harvey to shut up and calling him various farmyard-animal names. A New York cop soon arrived on the scene, where he found about 60 people "disrupting traffic," he said.

This is the first sign that something's out of whack with this story. This happens to be my neighborhood. On Oct. 4 there was no regular traffic in the Financial District, just a few emergency vehicles here and there. Besides, this particular corner is where two lightly traveled one-lane streets intersect among the narrow canyons of the Financial District, and those streets were being used as a virtual pedestrian mall. In fact, if you read the cop's report carefully, Harvey was disrupting "pedestrian traffic"--because everybody was sticking around to see what happened. But 60 people was nothing compared to the hordes one block away, at Broadway and Nassau, where rubber-neckers were packed like sardines trying to get a glimpse of the crash site.

Anyway, when the cop arrived on the scene, one guy yelled "F--- this guy! Lock that f---ing guy up before I kill him!"

This is such an old story in First Amendment law that it's turned up hundreds of times. Unpopular guy spouts off. Crowd heckles him and gets unruly. The proper thing to do is order the crowd to disperse, call for backup to control the mob, and arrest anybody who makes threats against the speaker. But about half the time, the cop does the same thing that Detective Nemesio Rodriguez chose to do on Oct. 4. He arrested Harvey for disorderly conduct.

At this point, because of a series of Supreme Court decisions that go back to 1833, the judge will normally throw out the case, lecture the officer for messing with the guy, and move on. A lot of cops actually know that the case will be thrown out, but they choose to arrest the rabble-rouser because it's just easier.

But the case of Harvey is taking a weird turn and apparently not going away. The judge is taking the view that the guy had no right to be saying these things, because he "consciously disregarded an unjustifiable risk of public inconvenience or alarm." The D.A. is going forward with the case. And Judge Neil Ross of Manhattan Criminal Court had this to say: "It is the reaction which speech engenders, not the content of the speech, that is the heart of disorderly conduct."

Hell, I thought disorderly conduct referred to what you were doing, but this judge thinks that if your political views make some guy so mad that he wants to kill you, then it's your fault.

The judge thinks Harvey had a reason to believe he'd be causing a stink because he chose Ground Zero for his leafleting. And I'm sure he did. He wanted to cause a stink. It's still legal to cause a stink, the last time I checked.

Anyhow, this ought to be a no-brainer, but since the New York authorities are moving forward, I offer the Joe Bob Briggs "I Didn't Go to Law School But This Is Not That Hard To Look Up" crash course in the law.

Exhibit Numero Uno: Stromberg vs. California (1931). A 19-year-old girl who was a member of the Youth Communist League supervised a summer camp for children in the San Bernardino Mountains where she ran the Commie flag up the flagpole every day and had all the kids recite a pledge of allegiance to "freedom for the working class."

She was arrested by the state under a law that said you couldn't fly a red flag -- yes, the statute specifically said "red" flag -- that was meant to symbolize opposition to established government, or intended to stimulate anarchy or aid seditious propaganda. The Supreme Court said forget it -- you can carry any sign you want, fly any flag you want, pledge any allegiance you want -- and it doesn't matter who yells about it.

So much for William Harvey's Osama bin Laden placard.

Exhibit Numero Two-o: Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire (1942).

Chaplinsky was a Jehovah's Witness who was handing out leaflets near City Hall in Rochester, New Hampshire, and proclaiming that "All religion is a racket!" A crowd was starting to get unruly, and when a cop showed up, Chaplinsky said, "You are a God damned racketeer! . . . and a damned Fascist and the whole government of Rochester are Fascists or agents of Fascists."

So he got jailed and convicted for addressing someone in "an offensive, derisive or annoying" manner. This resulted in the famous "fighting words" decision of the Supreme Court. They said that if Chaplinsky had just limited himself to his original purpose--talking about how all religion is a racket and trying to get people to join the Jehovah's Witnesses -- then he would have been okay. But there are a few "limited classes of speech" that any idiot would know are gonna cause a fight. They didn't state exactly what they are, but they said the lewd, obscene, profane, libelous and insulting are among them, and the practical effect of the decision was to say that you can stand there all day long and say "America sucks" but when you turn to a specific individual, and you say "YOU suck" in a way that everybody knows is gonna cause him to go off the deep end, then you lose.

There were "fighting words" spoken the day of Harvey's arrest, but they weren't spoken by Harvey. They were spoken by the guy who said "F--- this guy! Lock that f---ing guy up before I kill him!" It certainly qualifies on the lewd, obscene, profane, insulting and personal test. But the cop arrested Harvey, not the speaker of fighting words.

Exhibit Numero Three-o: Cohen vs. California (1971). Paul Cohen walked into the Los Angeles County Courthouse on April 26, 1968, wearing a jacket that said "F--- the Draft" on the back. He was arrested for "disturbing the peace by offensive conduct," the reason being there was a "tendency to provoke others to acts of violence." (Apparently there were people in the courthouse who wanted to beat him up.) The Supreme Court, when it got the case, said even the f-word was protected speech, and that, in fact, "one man's vulgarity is another's lyric." So they made a distinction between saying "F--- you," which remained "fighting words," and "F--- America," which is protected as political speech.

Although he didn't use the f-word, Harvey was basically saying "F--- America."

Exhibit Numero Four-o: Wisconsin vs. Mitchell (1993). A young black man in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was watching "Mississippi Burning" with his friends and decided, "Do you all feel hyped up to move on some white people?" A short time later he and his friends jumped a white boy who happened along and beat him so severely that he was in a coma for four days. Mitchell got two years added to his sentence because he was motivated by hate. The Supreme Court said, in this case, the law was constitutional, because his hate was directed against a person, not some political target, so it was just an extension of the idea of "motive."

Harvey didn't say "I'm gonna beat all you people up because you're not Arabs," and he didn't say, "I helped Osama bin Laden kill those people." He just said, "America got what it deserved."

Now. If you've been paying attention, you'll notice that all the cases that get to the Supreme Court involve... WACKOS!

We've got here a Youth Communist League member teaching kids to salute a red flag, a Jehovah's Witness who thinks the whole world is fascist, a hippie who likes to wear the f-word on his body, -- these kinds of issues only get worked out when the creepy misfits come out to play. And the way the Supreme Court works with all this colorful material is to say, "Did he bloody anybody's nose? Did he threaten to bloody any SPECIFIC person's nose? If not, then let him scream all he wants and write cuss words on the side of his house."

I like what Justice Felix Frankfurter said about this in 1944: "One of the prerogatives of American citizenship is the right to criticize public men and measures -- and that means not only informed and responsible criticism but the freedom to speak foolishly and without moderation."

But I like even more what Woodrow Wilson said about it: "I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking."

Then there's the Joe Bob Principle: The price of freedom is letting a nude transvestite anarchist with a Nazi armband stand on a tree stump in Central Park with a bullhorn. Think about it. Isn't that exactly where we want the guy? Out in the open where we can render him totally meaningless?

(Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at joebob@upi.com or through his website at joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.)