The Great Vance County Telephone Book Spat of '06

Up in Vance County a row is brewing over a phone book listing....

http://www.hendersondispatch.com/articles/2006/02/05/news/news02.txt

Turn to the "K"s and you see a hotline for a white supremacist organization who's already getting too much free publicity out of the spat, so let's just call them the Stupid Outmoded Bigots, the SOBs.

And someone is infuriated that the listing is in there and someone else is just enjoying grinding salt into the wound... and it's devolved into the predictable free-speech shouting match between the good-hearted civil rights soldier and the SOBs, who enjoy getting lot of play in the media with such contests.

And in one corner of this bout, trying to avoid getting dragged in but unable to slip out through the ropes, is the phone company in whose telephone book the SOBs' listing was, getting hit with the issue of why the listing is even in there, 'why don't you just do the right thing and take it out?'...

Well, it's not about the company's values, beliefs or support/hate/ambivalence about the SOBs - it's about our Constitution, rights and public utilities.

If I may simplify a little, the telephone company, though privately owned, is allowed it's work and regulated by the government as necessary to the populace - a public utility. The phone company can't just crank it's basic rates sky high, they can't abuse the communities they've been allowed to work in, they can't deny service based on their fallible whim.

Imagine a utility company contracted to install and maintain water lines for a town. They can't pick and choose who can drink the water that flows through their pipes.

A phone company can't simply on their good beliefs deny their fundamental services - 911, basic calls, a listing in the phone book... - to a person or legal organization.

And we live in a country where darn near every organization is legal.

Some communities restrict the existence of certain groups. In the US, our founding fathers, a bunch of rebels, ensured us the right to speak, to gripe... to assemble - an enlightenment concept that it's better to allow folks to have whatever groups they want and sort it out for themselves that have the government clamping down on who has the right to organize, like those union rapscallions, those trouble-making suffragettes, those uppity civil rights folks....

It's that same right which enabled the formation of the Boy Scouts, the Republicans, the Democrats, the NAACP... just imagine Rev. King's march on Washington without the right to assemble. He'd have been standing alone. Race reform wouldn't have gotten very far.

This open system does allow the occasional formation of less friendly groups such as the American Nazi Party and the SOBs, but that's the price we pay and thankfully the groups everyone agrees are full of it don't get too far come election time.

That's how our society works and it's worked better that anyone else's for the past 200-odd years.

And it works with, truly depends upon, the differences of opinion that have festered this debate.
So let's debate, let's discuss, let's reach the right answer (which I already gave you half a page ago)...

And let's all live to toast another two centuries of the First Amendment.

February is Black History Month. Wanna call to support your local NAACP? The number in Cleveland County is (704) 482-7509....

Wanna call the SOBs for a good free speech blessing out? Look em' up in a phone book....