RIGHTS HAVE LIMITS:

'Intimidating' cross burning can be banned (Michael Kirkland, 4/7/2003, UPI)

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the states can ban cross burning that is designed to intimidate others.

However, in a separate part of the ruling, a Supreme Court plurality struck down Virginia's ban on cross burning, citing procedural flaws. The ruling came in a challenge to the state law.

Virginia's statute treats any cross burning as obviously meant to intimidate, and the justices said that provision is too broad for the First Amendment.

Justice Clarence Thomas, the court's only black member, dissented from the plurality. Thomas refused to grant that the First Amendment was involved in the case, but argued that even it was, juries should be permitted to assume intimidation by the mere fact of a cross burning.

Citing the savage history of cross burning, Thomas quoted a favorite aphorism of the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "A page of history is worth a volume of logic."

Writing for the court, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the action has a romantic Scottish history -- "Sir Walter Scott used cross burnings for dramatic effect in The Lady of the Lake."

But that history has become lost in continuing tradition of racial hate.

"Burning a cross in the United States is inextricably intertwined with the history of the Ku Klux Klan," O'Connor said. From the Klan's inception, "cross burnings have been used to communicate both threats of violence and messages of shared ideology."

Banning cross burning, which such action is designed to intimidate rather than convey a political message, is constitutional, O'Connor said.

Though "civil libertarians" seem certain to decry it, this is a victory for anyone who takes the purposes of the Constiution more seriously than the most radical interpretations of particular provisions. The purposes are detailed quite simply in the Preamble:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Those who seek to read the First Amendment as an absolute grant of any kind of expression are stuck arguing that a document that establishes orderly government for specific purposes also countenances activities aimed at the overthrow of that government (communism, fascism, secession, white separatism, Islamicism, etc.) and/or intended to undermine those very purposes. This is obviously deranged and only the fetishization of "rights" has made such an absurd reading possible. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 7, 2003 1:27 PM