Town’s new fine for public profanity points to problem of ‘public’ spaces

By David McElroy · June 14, 2012

If you plan to spend any time in Middleborough, Mass., you might want to be careful if you’re the sort who enjoys slinging four-letter words around. The town’s residents voted 183-50 Monday night to enact a fine for the public use of profanity, so police will have their ears open.

In modern American society, this is typically seen as a conflict between free speech and civility. Some people believe you should be able to say anything you want without government interference, and others believe that offensive and vulgar behavior should be prohibited. Merchants in the town say some of their customers have been uncomfortable with groups of teens hanging out downtown and swearing loudly. So which side is right?

I’m an advocate of keeping government completely out of the business of censoring speech, but I’m also someone who detests profanity. (I’m one of the few people you know who you’ll never hear it from. I didn’t grow up with it and I’ve consciously avoided using it. It’s not what I want to be.) So it sounds as though these two competing values are in conflict and there’s no logical way to resolve it.

That’s sort of true. There’s no logical way to resolve it under the current system of “public” ownership of property and the rules that come with “public” space. But what if the real issue isn’t free speech vs. civility? What if the real issue is who owns property — and who should be allowed to make the rules?

There’s a basic tension between freedom and democracy. Freedom demands that people have the ability to say what they want to say without government censoring it. Democracy demands that the majority of those voting in the town have the right to establish rules for the others to follow. How do we resolve this?

The problem is the existence of “public property.” If everybody owns something, nobody really owns it. In the statist model that we live with today, we’re perpetually faced with that conflict between freedom and democracy. But what if everything were privately owned? Then the question could be settled by the owner — and people would “vote” with their patronage.

What if a downtown area were owned by a commercial company? What if a company developed property and planned shops and attracted merchants to fill up those stores — and then established the rules of behavior for patrons? There would then be no conflict. One shopping area might cater to a more sedate crowd that wants more civility and decorum. Another development might cater to a crowd that’s freewheeling and boisterous. And so forth. Customers would choose the plan that suited them the best. Some models would succeed and some would fail, but they would change as their owners decided that changes could attract customers.

What I’ve just described can’t work in the public system, because the First Amendment prevents governments from making the rules that limit speech. (Whether Middleborough’s rules stand up in court is an open question. It’s hard for me to believe that they will.) On the other hand, it’s a genuine problem for merchants who are trying to conduct business in a pleasant atmosphere and loud, profane people are bothering customers. The current system can’t resolve those conflicts.

We already do a limited version of this with shopping malls. I don’t care for the sterility of most shopping malls, but there are exceptions (and the exceptions tend to be nice places to spend time). We also do a limited version of this at places such as theme parks. You go through a gate and enter private space where someone else sets the rules.

Why can’t we extend this to the rest of society? In fact, why can’t we eliminate all “public” ownership of anything? Why can’t we let entire cities and enclaves of varying sizes operate under their own rules? It’s not possible today, but why can’t it exist in the future?

As long as we live with the coercive state in what it supposed to be a “liberal democracy,” there’s going to be a conflict between freedom and majority will. The privatization of everything — of all of society — is the solution. It’s something that will scare most people. It won’t happen all at once. But I think it’s where we’re going to end up.

In the meantime, I doubt these Middleborough fines will stand up in court. At this point, free speech is still going to trump majority will, but it’s silly that we live under a system that tries to balance these two irreconcilable things.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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