Category: Civil Liberties

Changes- Changes- Changes: 2

Sometimes your vote really does count. In the commonwealth-wide elections of 2013, 907 votes decided the attorney general’s race; the gubernatorial election was determined by a slightly wider margin (56 thousand votes out of 2.2 million). The happy result: newly-elected Governor McAuliffe and A-G Mark Herring chose not to defend indefensible law, and today, less than a year later, same-sex marriages are legal in Virginia. This is a change that I knew would happen eventually, but I am almost (pleasantly) shocked at how quickly it has come to pass.

In the most recent development, gay and lesbian couples are free to adopt in the Commonwealth. Our friends J. and L., who left the area some years ago so that they could start a family, are now welcome. Well, Virginia is for lovers.

84%

An op-ed piece by Nicholas K. Peart, reflecting on the five times this 23-year-old community college student has been stopped and frisked by police.

…last year, the N.Y.P.D. recorded more than 600,000 stops; 84 percent of those stopped were blacks or Latinos. Police are far more likely to use force when stopping blacks or Latinos than whites. In half the stops police cite the vague “furtive movements” as the reason for the stop. Maybe black and brown people just look more furtive, whatever that means.

Strange bedfellows

Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, II has pulled some bonehead plays in his short tenure as Attorney General of my Commonwealth, generally managing to push himself onto the national stage. It’s not for nothing that he has earned the nickname “The Cooch” from DCist. But when he’s right, I have to acknowledge it: citing First Amendment concerns, Cuccinelli has chosen not to climb on the bandwagon with other states in filing an amicus brief on behalf of the family of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder. Effectively, this puts the AG on the side of the reprehensible Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church organization. But, as foul as Phelps and his family may be in their invective, their right to say it is protected, within reason, and must continue to be protected. From the press release:

…Snyder v. Phelps… could set a precedent that could severely curtail certain valid exercises of free speech. If protestors—whether political, civil rights, pro-life, or environmental—said something that offended the object of the protest to the point where that person felt damaged, the protestors could be sued…. We do not think that regulation of speech through vague common law torts like intentional infliction of emotional distress strikes the proper balance between free speech and avoiding the unconscionable disruption of funerals.

To the extent that Cuccinelli is sincere in his reasoning, I agree with him. There is, perhaps, more to this story…

What it means to be civilized

The center-right Economist takes an unexpected but eloquent stand against torture in a leader this week:

A hot, total war like the second world war could not last for decades, so the curtailment of domestic liberties was short-lived. But because nobody knew whether the cold war would ever end (it lasted some 40 years), the democracies chose by and large not to let it change the sort of societies they wanted to be. This was a wise choice not only because of the freedom it bestowed on people in the West during those decades, but also because the West’s freedoms became one of the most potent weapons in its struggle against its totalitarian foes.

If the war against terrorism is a war at all, it is like the cold war—one that will last for decades. Although a real threat exists, to let security trump liberty in every case would corrode the civilised world’s sense of what it is and wants to be.