NOTE: THE WEB SITE DEMONS STRUCK AGAIN SUNDAY EVE, AND THE POST THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO GET POSTED A FEW MINUTES AFTER MIDNIGHT YESTERDAY MORN DID NOT APPEAR UNTIL ALMOST 6 PM.

WHAT WITH THE (PLANNED) ABSENCE OF A POST FRIDAY, SOME READERS CONCLUDED THAT THE NEWS GUY WAS OFF ON A TOOT.

NOT SO (AT LEAST NOT THIS TIME). MONDAY’S POST IS RIGHT BELOW THIS ONE.

Up in the Northeast Kingdom town of Barton,  some nice folks and the public library have been showing free movies at the library every Friday afternoon.

Good movies, some of them, including last Friday’s, the Marx Brothers classic 1935 comedy, A Night At The Opera.

As they do every week, library volunteers posted eight-and-a-half -by 11-inch flyers around town early in the week. By Wednesday, they had been defaced.

Well, maybe just altered. On the left side of the flyer someone had written, “Boycott film.” Then, under a line, “Good Friday. Go the church + pray.”

The librarian, Toni Eubanks, took down the altered flyers and put up new ones. But by Friday morning, the boycotter had struck again.

The boycott fizzled. A goodly crowd saw the movie, and no doubt enjoyed it. Especially, one suspects, when Harpo walked down the spiral staircase. Or maybe the line about the sanity clause.

As to the boycotter, he (proceeding here on the assumption it was a guy) will suffer no consequences. It isn’t that no one knows who it is. The word around town is that the young women who operate the cash registers at the C&C Supermarket across the street from the library have a pretty good idea.

(Believe it. They know all the town dirt. If one of them could write, and – who knows? – perhaps one can, she could become the Grace Metalious of the Twenty-first Century.).

Besides, the would-be boycott leader did no harm. Oh, he violated the “mind your own business” rule,  and seemed not to understand pluralism. It would apparently surprise him to learn that not every believing Christian goes to church on Good Friday, that not everyone is a Christian, or a believer.  Or that the library is the right place for all those folks to come together and the wrong place to bother others about going to church.

But this was a polite protest. The boycotter did not cover over the flyer, from which anyone could still learn what was playing, where, and when. He wrote his message with a fine-tipped ball point pen over on the side.  Had he not used the harsh word, “boycott,” he might almost have been trying to start a conversation.

That’s another reason he will, and should, suffer no consequences. Possibly, he violated some anti-defacing law. But he was saying something, which counts for quite a bit in this country. He wanted to make a point. He could have made it in a more appropriate venue, but that’s just a matter of taste, which by definition is subjective.

So there’s a free speech component here. Okay, it’s a trivial free speech component of a trivial matter. But here (for those of you wondering whether there was a point to all this) is what’s interesting: this is a good example of a situation in which expression — while protected, permitted, and Constitutionally guaranteed – is a bad idea.

Such situations are not rare. They come along quite frequently. Vermonters and other Americans keep asserting themselves. When challenged as to taste and appropriateness, they respond by asserting their right to assert. They have that right. But perhaps they are too assertive.

Understand that this assessment comes from a free speech absolutist, who believes that Americans have the right to advocate overthrowing the government, by force and violence if necessary. Of even if not necessary, just because it might be fun.

(To clarify, the judgment here is that violence is almost never fun, and that the preferred instrument for government over-throw is regularly scheduled elections. But that’s just the judgment here. Those with conflicting judgments must be allowed to state them, distasteful though they may be).

We have had, in recent Vermont history, another example of assertive and arguably obnoxious speech that was Constitutionally protected. In this case, the speakers are known. They are Boots Wardinski of Newbury and Michael Colby of Worcester, who on June 5, 2006, interrupted the commencement ceremony at St. Johnsbury Academy.

The object of their protest was the commencement speaker , John Negroponte, then the United States Director of National Intelligence (and the father of one of the graduates)

Shortly after Negroponte began speaking, Colby stood up and shouted, “In the name of democracy I object to this man speaking. He has blood on his hands from his work in Central America and Iraq. He shouldn’t be at the podium, he should be in jail. He is a war criminal.”

Colby was escorted out of the auditorium by police and Academy security staff.

“Now it’s my turn,” said Negroponte But Wardinski, a veteran political provocateur (and occasional losing candidate) in Vermont, stood up and said,  ”No! It’s my turn! When the headmaster introduced Negroponte, he forgot to tell about all the people tortured, killed and raped… You should be ashamed to stay in here and listen to this man.”

He, too, was escorted out of the hall. Both men had tickets to the invitation-only event. Both left peacefully. Both were convicted of recklessly creating a risk of public inconvenience or annoyance. The interruptions, the Vermont Supreme Court noted, ” lasted no more than thirty seconds (and) Negroponte delivered his speech in its entirety.”

Last month,  the State Supreme Court unanimously threw out the convictions. “The State must-but cannot-prove that defendants’ speech caused a substantial disruption of a lawful assembly,” the court ruled.  Making a bit of a commotion may be impolite. It may even technically violate a statute. But like the Barton movie boycotter, Colby and Wardinksi had something to say.

“If we use the disorderly conduct statute to punish defendants by not requiring that the disturbance be substantial,” said the Court, ” we would be punishing them for speech in violation of the First Amendment.”

The defendants, then, properly asserted their rights. But that does not establish either their taste or their wisdom, both of which, like those of the Barton boycotter, are questionable.

No, the two cases are not identical. Colby and Wardinski did what they did right out in public, taking their chances. They were braver.

But aside from the lack of courtesy (which is subjective, and at any rate was minor), they may have shared with the guy in Barton a lack of political smarts. All three protesters probably weakened their own case.

If the average Bartonian (full disclosure: I am one of them) had any reaction at all to the message on the movie flyers, it was probably, “Oh, another religious fanatic,” a sentiment quite possibly shared by folks who went to church on Good Friday. In St. Johnsbury, the graduates, their loved ones, and citizens reading about the event the next day were more likely to scorn Colby and Wardinski for their rudeness than to pay attention to their message, which wasn’t much more substantive than “Boycott film..Go to  church.” If there was a case to be made against Negroponte (and there was), they didn’t make it.

There’s a flip side to all this. Just as individuals have rights which are not always wise to exercise, government have powers they might be better off not using. Right now some of those powers are under consideration by the Legislature. How much control should the state exert over drivers when it comes to wearing their seat belts or talking on cell phones? Lurking around are questions over whether the state should require motorcyclists or skiers to wear helmets.

The debates over these questions re often ill-informed, with one faction asserting individual rights that don’t exist, the other claiming benefits that might never be realized.

We’ll consider that side of the coin tomorrow.

Ben Stein

Ben Stein will not deliver the commencement address at the University of Vermont this year after all.

Cancel one major league media frenzy, no doubt with attendant protest marches, petitioning, name-calling, and battling blogs.

The hullabaloo had already begun. It almost instantly become global. It seems to have prevailed.

The University did not announce the sudden reversal on Sunday of the announcement made only three days earlier that Stein-actor, writer, one-time presidential speech-writer, and conservative commentator-would be awarded an honorary degree and speak at the University’s 205tth Commencement on May 17.

But according to a widely read scientific web site, UVM President Daniel Mark Fogel wrote Sunday that, “Mr. Stein will be unable to receive the honorary degree here or to serve as Commencement speaker .”

Fogel wrote that in a letter to Richard Dawkins (pictured above),  the well-known evolutionary biologist who was the most prominent of several scientists protesting the choice of Stein, an outspoken advocate of “Intelligent Design,” who has argued that belief in evolution was partly responsible for the Holocaust.

Perhaps Stein had an earlier commitment for May 17 that he had failed to communicate to UVM officials before Thursday’s announcement that he would be the commencement speaker.

The usual drill in these matters, though, is that the inviters and the invitees work out scheduling problems before the press releases are issued, raising the possibility, if not the likelihood, that Fogel saw the fury inspired by the Stein announcement and decided to execute an abrupt, face-saving retreat.

University officials had neither comment nor information Sunday.

The intensity of the scientific community’s reaction is plain from Dawkins’ email to Fogel sent Sunday. Dawkins called the invitation to Stein “lamentable,” described him as a “notoriously mendacious propagandist for creationism,” and warned that UVM’s “reputation is in danger of being besmirched” by a commencement ceremony featuring Stein.

A few hours later, Fogel replied that as a great admirer of Dawkins he was “honored” to see a personal email from him in his inbox ” but very sorry indeed” about its content.

Though the University had “recently learned” that Stein would be unable to come, Fogel said, he assured Dawkins that Stein’s ” remarks would address the global economic crisis and that he would speak from his widely acknowledged area of expertise on the economy.”

That wasn’t quite an assurance that Stein wouldn’t say a word about evolution or about science in general. But it seemed to be heading in that direction.

Either way, Dawkins replied, thanking Fogel for his “extremely gracious letter,” and adding that he could not “disguise my gladness that Ben Stein will not be going to Vermont.”

The account and the quotes above were taken from Dawkins’s web site – RichardDawkins.net – and the Internet is a notoriously un-policed realm on which charlatans can and do put up fraudulent messages. In this case, though, the authenticity of the letters was confirmed (via an old-fashioned telephone interview) by Paul Z Myers, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota at Morris, and the proprietor of a scientific web site called Pharyngula. (“a term coined by William Ballard to describe a particular stage in the development of the vertebrate embryo,” according to the site).

Myers said he is in frequent contact with Dawkins, and vouched for the accuracy of RichardDawkins.net web site, and its account of the Dawkins-Fogel messages.

Pharyngula was one of several scientific web sites that immediately began to attack UVM for asking Stein to make the commencement address. The overwhelming disapproval of the scientific community can hardly seem to be an inviting prospect to an administration that has been striving, with some success, to enhance the scholarly image of the university.

And Dawkins is a powerful force in the scientific community. Since the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976 he has been among the world’s most highly regarded biologists. He’s also a fierce polemicist and a militant atheist, lately more famous for his 2006 book, The God Delusion.

As admired as Dawkins is among scientists (including many who are not atheists), Stein is scorned as a showman whose views are hostile not merely to science but to rational inquiry in general. Many, including Dawkins and Myers, were especially angry about the movie Expelled, which Stein co-wrote and starred in, a film which claims that those who deny evolution are victims of religious persecution by the scientific community.

Both Dawkins, in his letter to Fogel, and Myers in an interview claimed that Stein got them to appear in the film under false pretenses.

” I am one of several evolutionary biologists who, in good faith, agreed to be interviewed by Stein and his team, on the basis of what turned out to be flagrant lies as to the true purpose of the film,” Dawkins wrote.” In my case, Stein and his team then went on deliberately to distort my words.”

Myers said he was told the film was “to be a serious movie about  the conflict between science and religion , something I would happily participate in.  What it turned out to be instead is move that accuses science of killing, and of responsibility for the Holocaust.”

The university’s own faculty was upset about Thursday’s announcement, but didn’t really get time to organize a response.

“I’m unhappy but I don’t want to say anything now,” said one science professor, asking not to be identified. “This is something the Faculty Senate should consider.”

Another professor said there should be no effort to censor Stein, who spoke at UVM without incident last April. But inviting Stein to deliver the commencement address effectively meant that the University was “honoring” him, the professor said, which he called quite different from permitting him to air his views.

Many economists would dispute Fogel about Stein’s “acknowledged…expertise on the economy,” Stein writes on economic and business matters for many journals, including the New York Times. He majored in economics at Cornell but has no advanced degrees in the field. He is a lawyer. But he is no doubt best known for his acting role as the boring, pompous, teacher in the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Stein’s economic views are mostly conservative, but in the past few years he has written several columns critical of rising income inequality and the low tax rates paid by upper income earners.

(NOTE: Due to a computer error [Well, OK, the computer operator's error] last Friday’s post did not get posted until Saturday evening. It is now in its chronological spot on the site, just below, for anyone who is interested.)