David McElroy

The test of free speech is whether you can say what you want to say when other people — including politicians — disagree with what you’re saying. When government bodies start voting to demand that you shut up, something has gone dreadfully wrong.

There’s apparently a matchmaking service called Arrangement Finders, but it’s a bit different from most online dating services. This outfit specializes in matching an “Established Man” with a “Perfect Princess,” in the words of the site. Is it dating or is it glorified prostitution? I can’t tell for sure, but it looks to me as though it’s really a legitimate service for men and women who are looking for others to fill a specific role.

An ABC News story says that men pay a monthly fee to the service and women join for free. It’s apparently been controversial in other cities, such as Chicago and Los Angeles. The site’s FAQs say your profile will be deleted if you advertise any kind of escort services.

I’d never heard of the service, but the company did something smart. It placed one billboard in Birmingham, about a mile from the airport, in a rundown part of town where billboards are probably cheap. And then outraged local people — and pandering politicians — gave them all the free publicity they could possibly want.

Last week, the Jefferson County Commission voted to ask the company to remove the billboard. Commission president David Carrington played the “it’s for the children” card when he told the Birmingham News why the billboard should come down.

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I was talking with a friend Sunday about some things that bother us about mainstream middle-class American culture. She was telling me about having to go to the home of a relative for holidays for years. Everyone was expected to buy expensive presents for everyone at Christmas.

She was describing her sister’s house, which had five bedrooms, five baths, work room, weight room, art room, pool, trampoline, built-in everything, eight televisions with eight cable boxes and a three-car garage.

It sounds like a really nice house, doesn’t it? So why was my friend bothered by it all? And why did the description sound so suffocating and sickening to me?

It was hard to put my finger on it, but I thought about it for much of the afternoon. I’ve thought about this issue before and I sometimes have trouble justifying the revulsion I feel for such things. I can try to justify my feelings in practical terms by talking about the waste of money and resources that go into such places, but the real answer goes much deeper than that. (Here’s another attempt I made about 18 months ago to answer the same question.)

Trying to understand why I feel this way is making it easier for me to understand why punks, goths, rappers and other “weirdos” of the world dress as they do and reject acting and looking like what we consider normal.

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This picture isn’t from urban fighting in Iraq a few years back. It’s from Tuesday in Birmingham. More than a hundred officers — local police, sheriff’s deputies and DEA agents — stormed a housing project to conduct seven simultaneous drug raids.

Reporters and photographers from The Birmingham News were along for the ride and recorded the action. The pictures make it look like something from a TV show such as “COPS.”

And what was the result of this massive show of force? Six people were arrested and two weapons were confiscated. That seems to be it. The newspaper said that “the operation was aimed at the ongoing problem of people selling crack cocaine, meth, marijuana and Lortab out of apartments there, and even on street corners.”

So an entire housing project was disrupted with more than a hundred heavily armed officers just to pick up six suspects? All so they can’t conduct voluntary transactions with other people? It seems like an open-and-shut case of state overreach — which is typical of the so-called drug war.

But at least some residents were happy to see police. For instance, 31-year-old Kimberly Coleman told the newspaper that she woke up a couple of weeks ago to discover a bullet hole in her living room window.

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