OPINION: When Massachusetts woman Louise Barron, 71, stood up and, not for the first time, called her local town board members “Hitlers” who were “spending like drunken sailors”, she got zero points for originality or proportionality.
But she found illustrious allies ‒ constitutional founding fathers John and Samuel Adams ‒ in her lawsuit against the board’s attempt to silence her under its civility code.
They’d enshrined in the state’s constitution the right to be rude, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled last month. The court invalidated the civility code, leaving Barron free to heckle on – with cacophonous implications for public meeting barrackers everywhere.
Key to the decision was that the Adams believed it important Bostonians remained free to call King George III and other authorities insulting and even profane names.
They rated verbal abuse of the powerful as a bulwark against physical abuse of power.
The founding fathers said nothing about dousing people in tomato juice or throwing sex toys at Waitangi, and being high-minded, the pair could never have envisaged a time when the entire American population might need protection from a former president’s constant abusive heckling.
Heaven forfend anyone should quarrel with the Massachusetts judiciary either, but heckling is seldom an elegant or even an effective tool.
Here in Ireland, a school teacher has ranted himself to public opprobrium after his principal asked him to use “they” as a pronoun for a student.
Enoch Burke, who didn’t even teach the child, said it contravened his religious beliefs to use “they” and that to force the other children to use it was child abuse.
That wasn’t why he was suspended – on full pay – from his job. It was because he heckled an assembly, harassed the principal and made such a disruptive fuss in front of the children the board suspended him for a disciplinary hearing.
Neither was his refusal to use “they” responsible for his later remand in custody. Burke kept turning up at school hectoring colleagues, so was arrested and eventually spent 108 days in the slammer.
The courts have now dismissed his reinstatement case, which he and his family campaigned on. There’s some sympathy for his views, but since he put his agency ahead of that of a vulnerable child, he’s generally seen more as a rather heartless public nuisance than a martyr.
The school would doubtless have made sure the child never had to be in the same room as a teacher who so disrespected their feelings. But Burke chose the – as it turned out limited – power of noise over civilised compromise.
Whatever anyone’s views or fears about either gender fluidity or religious doctrine, compassion is a pretty reliable navigational tool.
There’s also that pesky brake on the Burkean freedom idyll: the law. Most countries oppress those who would like to genitally mutilate young girls, and that sort of oppression is tolerated with great societal enthusiasm. We also pitilessly repress those who would enslave others or murder family members who refuse to marry assigned partners.
Grey areas abound. Kate Forbes, who stood in vain for the Scottish National Party leadership, admits she upholds her church’s doctrine that homosexuality is a sin.
While a very able politician, she, like rugby star Israel Folau, is having to accept that such views come with a societal, and in her case, an electoral penalty.
But on the whole, hooray for the founding fathers. Their enshrining of rudeness is a foil for Abraham Lincoln’s great advice: “It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
Letting people speak their minds, however gorblimey the contents, gives us a better basis on which to judge the calibre of those minds.
